Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

Lily Lewis

Lily Lewis

Sketches of a Canadian Journalist A Biocritical Study by Peggy Martin

s

With a selection of sketches by Lily Lewis Rood edited by Peggy Martin

© 2006 Peggy Martin Published by the University of Calgary Press 2500 University Drive NW Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2N 1N4 www.uofcpress.com Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Martin, Margaret Kathleen, 1943 Lily Lewis : sketches of a Canadian journalist : a biocritical study / Peggy Martin. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-55238-190-0 1. Lewis, Lily. 2. Lewis, Lily—Criticism and interpretation. 3. Women authors, Canadian (English)—19th century—Biography. 4. Women authors, Canadian (English)—20th century—Biography. 5. Women journalists—Canada—Biography. 6. Authors, Canadian (English)—19th century—Biography. 7. Authors, Canadian (English)—20th century—Biography. I. Title. PN4913.L48M37 2006 C818’.409 C2006-902090-6 No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada, through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts for our publishing activities. We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. Printed and bound in Canada by AGMV Marquis This book is printed on 60 lb. Rolland Enviro 100 natural text Cover design, page design and typesetting by Mieka West

For Tim and Carol, and in memory of my father, Rork Wigmore

Table of Contents

Foreword … ix Acknowledgements … xi Part One

Introduction Recovering Lily Lewis … 3 Part Two

Reading Lily Lewis A Biocritical Study L.L. Paris Correspondent … 28 A Tour of Switzerland and Italy … 35 Louis Lloyd Montreal Correspondent … 50 Around the World … 59 A Summer in Paris … 83 Parisian Personalities … 86 Lily Lewis Rood … 89 Conclusion: Sketching a Woman’s Life … 110

Part Three

A Selection of Sketches By Lily Lewis Rood Introduction Principles of Selection … 121 Sketches L.L. “Our Paris Letter” … 128 “Letters From Italy” … 139 Louis Lloyd “Montreal Letter” … 148 “Around the World By Ourselves”: “Louis Lloyd’s Letters” … 157 “Parisian Topics” … 212 “Parisian Personalities” … 221 Lily Lewis Rood “Prose Poems” … 228 “Pierre Puvis de Chavannes”… 231 Appendices Appendix A Lily Lewis Rood: Chronology … 249 Appendix B Letters … 251 Bibliography … 261 Index … 269

Foreword I was immediately intrigued when, in 1998, I received a phone call from Peggy Martin, who was trying to locate any living relatives of Lily Lewis Rood. I knew little about Lily or her life’s work, other than she was a bohemian figure, a world traveller, and, somewhat unusually for her time, a published Canadian woman writer. My father, who was born in 1889, and his only sister, Gwyneth, would have known their Aunt Lily as children, but they rarely spoke of her to me. A shadow had been cast over Lily and the mental illness that ultimately destroyed her later life. My father and aunt had, however, collected and passed on to me family papers and memorabilia that included material about Lily, which I was pleased to make available to Peggy Martin. Our family has, since the days of my greatgrandfather John Lewis’ emigration to Canada in the 1840s, been small in number, affectionate and loyal. In matters social, political and intellectual, the Lewis family has been broad-minded, and it is no surprise to learn that Lily was progressive, if not radical, in her views. Independent thought and action would always have been accepted with good humour in a Lewis household. Unpleasantness, however, was an entirely different matter, and it is probable that the distrust that Lily expressed towards her brothers and sister as her illness manifested would, in those days, have itself been regarded as unforgivable. Coupled with the lack of any cure, her incarceration in England appears to have led to estrangement. However, her family’s continued financial support, and the fact that her final resting place ix

at the Mount Royal Cemetery in Montreal is beside her parents, and a sister and brother, indicate that family loyalties ultimately prevailed. One of our Welsh relations, my namesake Sir Herbert Lewis, was a friend and confidant of the politician Lloyd George, and it may be through this connection that Lily had cause to meet the Prime Minister, an association which ultimately led her into difficulty. It appears that diagnosis and cure for Lily were beyond the medical knowledge of the day, and so, sadly, she became lost to our family. With today’s improved understanding of mental disease, we can perhaps see more clearly the tragedy of her decline. We are pleased to see Lily’s work revealed through Peggy Martin’s interest, effort, and schol­ arship. The whole family takes a measure of both comfort and pride in Lily Lewis Rood’s being recognised as a Canadian woman of literary ability and distinction, perhaps not so long before her story and her writings might otherwise have been lost to the passage of time. Herbert Lewis Vancouver July 2003



Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

Acknowledgements I wish to thank the many people who, individually and collectively, have provided me with support and assistance in researching and completing this volume. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Lily Lewis’s great nephew Herbert Lewis, without whose help and support much of this study would not have been possible. I sincerely thank Mr. Lewis for generously sharing with me stories and speculations, for allowing me access to family archival material, and for granting me permission to include photographs, letters, and information from legal documents. I am grateful, also, to Mr. Lewis and his wife, Mrs. Cynthia Lewis, for their very kind and charming hospitality, both in Vancouver and in Montreal, and for their continued interest in and assistance with this project. Many thanks, also, to Herbert Lewis for providing the Foreword to this volume. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the University of Saskatchewan through the Publications Fund. I am grateful to all the members of the Department of English at the University of Saskatchewan for providing a supportive and stimulating academic community in which to work. Thank you to Camille Slights and Bill Slights for much appreciated comments on a section of this work. Thanks also to Carole Gerson, Valerie Korinek, Lisa Vargo, and Francis Zichy for helpful readings of an earlier work on Lily Lewis, and to Janice Fiamengo, Anthony Harding, Wendy Roy, and Lisa Vargo for advice about this work and papers related to it. And a special thank you to Department Head

xi

Paul Bidwell and Associate Dean of Arts Peter Stoicheff for their efforts on my behalf. My thanks to John King for helpful editorial advice, and to all of the other members of the staff at UC Press who contributed to this project, including editor Peter Enman, grants writer Kellie Moynihan, and graphic designer Mieka West. I also much appreciate the work of copy editor Windsor Viney and indexer Ann Smith, and Karee Davidson’s and John Nanson’s assistance with the photographs. My thanks, too, to the staff in Interlibrary Loans at the University of Saskatchewan Library, to Barbara Lawson of the Redpath Museum, McGill University, to private researchers Mrs. Heather Feather of Leigh on Sea, UK and Ms. Barbara Winn of Montreal, and especially to Mrs. Sheena Ebsworth, Medical Records Manager, Broadmoor Hospital, Crowthorne, UK, and senior managers at Broadmoor Hospital for granting me access to, and permission to use, material from Lily Lewis’s medical files. I want to thank my daughters, Stacey Martin and Deane Martin Gray, for their strong encouragement, and to acknowledge my late father, Rork Wigmore, for his supportive interest in this project. I extend a very special thank you to Carol Morrell for invaluable advice and direction during the research and writing of the initial stage of this study, and for her continuing encouragement and assistance and unswerving belief in the value of this project. And finally, I thank my husband, Tim Martin, for unflagging support in ways too numerous to mention. Some of my research on Lily Lewis has appeared in English Studies in Canada as “Discovering Lily Lewis: A Canadian Journalist and New Woman” (no. 30.2, 2004).

xii Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

Part One

Introduction Recovering Lily Lewis

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n September, 1888, two young Canadian journalists, Sara Jeannette Duncan, originally from Brantford, Ontario, and Lily Lewis, of Montreal, headed west on the Canadian Pacific Railway, beginning a trip that would take them to points in western Canada, to Japan, India, Egypt, and eventually to England. Both had obtained commissions to send regular articles to prominent newspapers in eastern Canada, writing under already-well-known pseudonyms, Duncan as “Garth Grafton” for the Montreal Daily Star and Lewis as “Louis Lloyd” for the Toronto paper The Week. Neither returned to Canada to live. Duncan settled in India and has been increasingly recognized for her novels, stories, and sketches, her first published work being A Social Departure: How Orthodocia and I Went Round the World by Ourselves, a partially fictionalized account of the world tour. Lewis has been almost entirely forgotten or misremembered as Duncan’s fictional “Orthodocia.” According to early Canadian bibliographer Henry Morgan, Lewis lived in Paris following the tour, at least until 1912, and continued to publish a variety of work. Almost nothing has been known about her personal life, however, and her work prior to, and following, the tour has received no critical attention. This volume begins to redress that neglect. I became interested in Lily Lewis when I discovered just how absent she was from sources of information about Canadian women writers of her time, and several years ago began a research project hoping to learn something about Lily Lewis’s life and recover as much as I could of her later writing. Duncan’s and Lewis’s accounts of their journey in the Star and The Week, respectively, were easily accessible when I began my project. Also readily available were thirty-three sketches Introduction Recovering Lily Lewis



by Louis Lloyd published in The Week between November, 1887, and September, 1888, under the heading “Montreal Letter,” a regularly appearing column in which Lloyd describes and comments upon people, places, and current culture in Montreal. The following entries from Henry Morgan’s The Canadian Men and Women of the Time: A Handbook of Canadian Biography, published in 1898, and The Canadian Men and Women of the Time: A Handbook of Canadian Biography of Living Characters, published in 1912, describe Lily Lewis’s career as an author as she would have described it to him: Rood, Mrs. Lilian, author, is the dau. of the late John Lewis, Surveyor of Customs, Montreal, and was b. and ed. in that city. She commenced to write for the Week and other Can. Publications, under the nom de plume of “Louis Lloyd.” Later, she accompanied Miss Duncan (now Mrs. Cotes) on her voyage round the world. She spent some yrs. in Paris and London, and was a writer for Galignani’s Messenger. Among other papers to which she has contributed articles and sketches have been the Pall Mall Gazette and Budget, the London World, the London Times, and the St. James Gazette. In 1895 she published a remarkably able character sketch of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, the French artist and Presdt. of the New Salon (Boston: Prang & Co.). The edition was limited to 500 copies. Later, she edited “The World’s Congress on Ornithology.” She is now preparing for publication a work on Japan. She m. some yrs. ago, Roland, s. of Ogden N. Rood, Columbia Coll., N.Y. – 89 Union Park St., Boston, Mass. (1898: 879) Rood, Mrs. Lily, author. 

Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

D. late John Lewis, Surveyor of Customs, Montreal: b. and e. there; wrote for The Week and other Can. Publications, under the nom de plume of “Louis Lloyd”; went round the world and subsequently wrote descriptive articles about the journey; later, went to Egypt with the Princess Gortchakow-Stonrdza, a daughter of the Russian Chancellor, going up the Nile to Dongola, where no white woman had ever been before; published an account of this expedition in a French review; has written for other newspapers and mags. in Paris and London, including Gagliani’s [sic] Messenger,1 the Paris Temps, the Pall Mall Gazette, the Budget, London World, London Times and St. James Gazette; also the Boston Transcript, and N.Y. Bookman in Am.; published a remarkable character sketch of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, late presdt. of the New Salon (1895), and since then, a little book of Japanese sketches; m. Roland, s. Prof. Ogden N. Rood, Columbia Coll., has lived for many yrs at Paris. – 9 Quai Voltaire, Paris, France. (1912: 965–66)

In what has proved to be the only critical commentary about Lily Lewis that I have encountered, Marian Fowler, in Redney: A Life of Sara Jeannette Duncan, and Thomas Tausky, in Sara Jeannette Duncan: Novelist of Empire, refer briefly to some of Lewis’s articles from the world tour in conjunction with their critical and biographical writing about Duncan.2 Fowler speculatively presents a Lily Lewis rather less assertive than her companion, a modest Lily who “habitually stayed in the background” (153), but who shared with Duncan a “youthful joie de vivre [and] … a keen sense of humour” (149). Tausky, too, sees both dissimilarities and shared sentiments, and attributes to Lily Introduction Recovering Lily Lewis



“more flexibility of mind, and more desire to understand an alien sensibility” (63). Of Lewis’s life subsequent to the tour and in addition to Henry Morgan’s information, Fowler is able to state only that Lily Lewis “would … spend her married life in Paris, have a baby who died, get a divorce, and pass a rather sad old age in England” (219). Apart from Fowler’s and Tausky’s comments and a few brief references in Marjory Lang’s volume about women journalists in Canada, 3 Lily Lewis has been omitted from critical or biographical commentary about Canadian writers in general, Canadian women journalists, or Canadian travel writers. I have located some of the later work mentioned in Morgan’s account, notably several sketches by Louis Lloyd in British and American periodicals, and some prose poems and an original copy of Lewis’s only work published in book form, the monograph by Lily Lewis Rood describing the life and work of French artist Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. I have also identified an earlier body of work not previously attributed to Lewis, a series of newspaper sketches in which, as a precocious twenty-year-old Canadian visiting the cities of Europe, she confidently positions herself as an aspiring art critic as well as a travelling journalist. I have been especially fortunate to discover a surviving great-nephew of Lewis’s, Mr. Herbert Lewis of Vancouver, who has generously shared with me stories and speculations about his aunt’s later life, and, more recently, granted me access to newly unearthed family papers including photographs, diaries, letters, and other documents. While this material provides much new information about Lewis’s life and begins to explain the silence that has obscured her story, it is nevertheless sketchy and incomplete, and Lily Lewis 

Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

remains a shadowy figure whose life in many ways continues to be a mystery. Her wide variety of public sketches, most of which describe other people and other places, help to complete the story of Lewis’s own life as a Canadian woman writer at the turn of the nineteenth century. Lewis’s work also provides an important source for scholars interested in early Canadian women’s writing. Recent scholarship in this area tends to focus on feminine aspects of women’s writing: private forms, domestic and sentimental themes, social concerns. For example, Marjory Lang emphasizes the “separate sphere” occupied by “lady journalists,” claiming, “[t]hey wrote for women as women about things that traditionally occupied women in the home” (Women Who Made the News 7). Similarly, much criticism of early Canadian writing places it within a distinctly national context. Lewis’s journalism, in contrast, is international rather than domestic or national in scope, and concerned as much with the masculine domains of art and culture as with the feminine realms of fashion and housekeeping, or even political activism; as such, it provides new insight into the breadth and diversity of Canadian feminist expression in the nineteenth century. For scholars interested in Duncan, Lewis’s sketches of the world tour, together with letters written to members of Lewis’s family by both Lewis and Duncan during the tour, offer an intriguing alternate perspective to Duncan’s better-known versions. Lewis’s sketches published both prior to and following the tour reveal the extent to which a young Canadian woman could position herself on the international scene, though details of her later struggles also suggest the difficulties of such an adventure.

Introduction Recovering Lily Lewis



The primary work for this project has involved many frustrations and disappointments along with some gratifying discoveries. At one point in my research, in answer to a request for statistical information from Archives nationales du Québec, I was informed that only Lily’s brother Lansing is recorded as having been born to John and Matilda Lewis of Montreal, the people Morgan names as Lily’s parents. Lansing Lewis is described in The Canadian Who Was Who (Roberts and Tunnel 303-05) and in his obituary (“Lansing Lewis Worthy Citizen Laid to Rest”) as a prominent and distinguished citizen of Montreal who participated actively in the civic, political, religious, and cultural life of the city, and who apparently was a strong supporter of women’s suffrage, but only Morgan’s brief entry describes Lily. A search of the records of the Montreal High School and the Montreal Girls’ School similarly revealed no trace of Lily. I was beginning to wonder if perhaps she had not existed at all, if Sara Duncan had perhaps invented Lewis and written both Louis Lloyd’s and Garth Grafton’s columns herself. I was gratified finally to find Lily Lewis’s signature on Lansing Lewis’s 1875 baptism certificate. Through an extensive search of later editions of Who’s Who in Canada, I managed to locate Lansing Lewis’s grandson, Herbert Lewis.4 Lily Lewis did, indeed, exist. Conflicting information lists her birth date as 30 October 1866, and as sometime in 1867,5 but she died on 5 October 1929, and is buried in the John Lewis family plot in Montreal’s Mount Royal Cemetery. The inscription on the flyleaf of an elementary school book prize refers to her as “Lily Amy Lewis.” Besides Lansing Llewellyn Mostyn (1854–1927), she had another brother, Albert Edward (born in 1860), and an older sister, Eleanor Ida (Ella) (1856– 

Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

1930). Her parents, John and Matilda Lewis, appear to have been prominent and highly respected members of Montreal’s Anglophone community. According to Herbert Lewis, Lily was considered “a bit of a black sheep,” and consequently was not talked about very much by the family. Her family apparently did not approve of her choice to live and work in Paris, and they did not care much, either, for her “artist husband.” According to Morgan, Lewis married Roland Rood of New York, the son of Columbia University professor and prolific author Ogden Rood, and among the family papers that I examined recently at Mr. Lewis’s invitation, I found a newspaper notice announcing the marriage on 23 April 1891, at St. George’s Church, Bloomsbury, London, as well as a number of letters referring to divorce proceedings between 1897 and 1899. No mention of a baby appears anywhere. The Lewis papers include two warm letters from Lily to her family written during the tour with Duncan and affectionately signed photographs dated in the early Eighteen Nineties, as well as correspondence providing evidence of an acrimonious estrangement from her family towards the end of the decade. Mystery continues to surround Lewis’s later years, but bits of correspondence indicate that she suffered a lengthy mental illness in England. British medical records in fact reveal she spent several months in 1915 as a patient in the hospital known then as the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum and was transferred from there to a private hospital in Staffordshire. These records also indicate that her incarceration and continuing hospitalization were related to some extent to her dispute with her family. Members of Lewis’s immediate family nevertheless appear to have supported her in various ways during these years. At the time of her Introduction Recovering Lily Lewis



death she had for some time resided voluntarily at Camberwell House, an institution for the mentally ill located on the outskirts of London. After collecting Lewis’s and Duncan’s accounts of their world tour in The Week and the Montreal Daily Star, and Lewis’s “Montreal Letter” column of 1887 and 1888, I began to search for the material that Morgan reports Lily Lewis published after the trip. Marian Fowler claims that at the end of May, 1889, one month after she and Duncan ended their trip in London, Lily Lewis moved to Paris (Redney 175),6 and in a number of articles in both the Montreal Star and The Week, Louis Lloyd writes about summer events in Paris, focussing mainly on the great Exposition. I located several sketches by Louis Lloyd published in 1890 in the Pall Mall Gazette under the heading “Parisian Personalities.” These sketches describe Parisian artists and their ateliers, some writers and journalists, and “The Princess Gortschakoff,” a Russian woman famous for her Parisian entertainments. This descriptive piece about the princess has turned out to be the only link I have been able to find to the expedition up the Nile noted by Morgan. Among the Lewis papers I discovered a copy, signed by Lily Lewis Rood herself, of the monograph about Puvis de Chavannes, published in 1895 by Prang & Company of Boston. An 1885 article by Lewis Rood in the journal Modern Art portrays de Chavannes7 from a somewhat different perspective. Lastly, two prose poems in the 1896 New York Bookman represent an interesting departure from Lewis’s usual prose and indirectly present Lily Lewis’s story in a different and affecting way. A close reading of earlier editions of The Week offers strong textual evidence that Lewis also spent some time as a journalist in Paris in 1886 10

Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

and 1887, working under yet another signature. Thirty-two sketches by a writer using the initials “L.L.” appear between 3 January 1886 and 9 June 1887. Of these, the first eighteen describe Parisian life and cultural events from the perspective of a young Canadian correspondent residing in Paris; the last fourteen, beginning 4 November 1886, describe a tour of Switzerland and Italy. Having carefully examined these columns together with the later ones by Louis Lloyd, I am convinced that L.L., like Louis Lloyd, is a pen name adopted by Lily Lewis. L.L.’s sketches introduce Lewis as an erudite and versatile writer possessing a sophistication unusual in someone so young. Lewis would have been twenty years old in 1886, and in small but significant moments she emerges within L.L.’s sketches as a young Canadian woman, privileged, educated, lively and opinionated, and linked, in both blatant and subtle ways, to the Louis Lloyd and the Lily Lewis Rood of later years. L.L.’s sketches attest to an international focus in Canadian cultural life and thought in the 1880s that later faded as intellectual leaders sought to create a distinctly national cultural milieu. To the late nineteenth-century Canadian imagination, Paris represented the pinnacle of European culture. The Week, an especially cosmopolitan publication published in Toronto between 1883 and 1896, regularly featured columns with titles such as “Notes from Paris” and “Views from the Paris Salons,” and L.L.’s “Our Paris Letter” therefore entered a well-established tradition. Beneath L.L.’s journalist persona we begin to perceive a young writer who is a product of her background and at the same time a unique individual with very much of a mind of her own. As L.L. observes and comments upon “the outcasts of society” (“Our Paris Letter” 11 Feb. 1886) Introduction Recovering Lily Lewis

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represented in current Parisian theatre productions, educated Parisian “coquettes” (“Our Paris Letter” 5 Aug. 1886), “dilapidated socialists” (“Notes on News from Paris” 30 Dec. 1886), and enlightened vivisectionists (“Paul Bert,” 7 Apr. 1887), Lewis reveals the characteristically ambivalent attitude towards social and feminist issues along with the liberal Christian humanism that influences much of her later writing as well. Adopting a voice that more closely resembles that of the fin de siècle flâneur, the relaxed loiterer in sidewalk cafes and gaslit streets, than that of the social reformer and temperance advocate prevalent among Canadian women writers of the turn of the century, L.L. expresses Lewis’s belief in the social and educational value of travel as she describes the sights she sees and the people she encounters. L.L.’s descriptive sketches of Italian art and architecture expose glimpses of an educated scholar immersed in the ideas of the British Victorian intellectuals and art critics John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Matthew Arnold, and Anna Jameson, and a talented impressionist familiar with the popular travel essays of the American writer Henry James. Striking similarities between L.L.’s Italian descriptions and those of contributors to The Week in the 1890s, notably the Halifax writer Alice Jones, whose work is much better known today than Lewis’s, suggest that Lewis’s writing certainly anticipated and perhaps directly influenced her successors. L.L. disappears from The Week following her final “Letter From Rome” column of 9 June 1887, and three months later, Louis Lloyd, identified by Henry Morgan as Lewis, appears as the author of “Our Montreal Letter,” a column similar in voice, content, and attitude to L.L.’s “Our Paris Letter.” In many of Lloyd’s comments in these accounts, 12

Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

we can see Lily Lewis attempting to connect her current persona with the cosmopolitan voice of L.L. Similarities in language and metaphors provide further threads linking Lloyd with L.L. As she describes her interview with a visiting childwidow from India and a visit, in New York, with a prominent leader of the suffrage movement, for example, Lloyd continues to express Lewis’s eclectic views. Sketches such as one describing Montreal artist William Brymner’s attic studio “in the dingiest, busiest, smokiest part of the city” (“Montreal Letter” 9 Feb. 1888) anticipate the focus on art and artists that infuses Lewis’s later writing from Paris in the 1890s and also exemplify Lewis’s refusal to write only as a “lady journalist.” Despite her many departures from the typical, Lewis nevertheless in many ways epitomizes Carole Gerson’s and Veronica Strong-Boag’s “Canadian version” of the “New Woman.”8 Gerson and Strong-Boag define the New Woman as “an international phenomenon [whose] leitmotif … was independence” (Paddling Her Own Canoe 59). “Often identified with feminism, though not always a suffragist, the New Woman appeared in the Western world in the 1880s and survived into the 1920s” (59). In her espousal of many causes, she sought to “improve her own lot and that of her sex in general” (59). The Canadian version, they claim, usually comprised middle-class women who “set about to earn their own living, able to assert both respectability and some independence from their families” (60). Eva-Marie Kröller, in her volume Canadian Travellers in Europe 1851– 1900, defines as the goals of the New Woman the acquisition of a profession and “the freedom to move about at will” (74). She refers to the women travellers she discusses as New Women striking Introduction Recovering Lily Lewis

13

out on their own and devising their own itinerary and their own way of thinking about the sights and people they encounter – women like Sara Jeannette Duncan’s heroines in A Social Departure (74). The corresponding non-fictional travellers depicted in Louis Lloyd’s and Garth Grafton’s columns in The Week and the Montreal Daily Star describing Lewis’s and Duncan’s world tour similarly fit these descriptions. Lewis and Duncan embarked upon their journey across Canada on 17 September 1888. Joseph Pulitzer of the New York World co-sponsored the enterprise along with the Canadian publications, and the resulting articles attracted much attention throughout the continent. Duncan had gained considerable experience as a journalist by this time as well, having worked as a parliamentary correspondent in Ottawa, as a reporter for the Washington Post, and as a columnist for the Toronto Star. The two young women had probably met in Montreal between October 1887 and March 1888, when Duncan lived in Montreal and wrote a column for the Star as Garth Grafton. The narrator of Duncan’s A Social Departure describes her companion as being twenty-two, as Lewis would have been in 1888, and after commenting at some length about their families’ concerns that the girls have chaperones, she states, “Orthodocia had simply prevailed” (A Social Departure 2). This, I suspect, might very well have been precisely what had transpired between a determined Lily Lewis and her family as she obtained their permission to go round the world, unchaperoned, with her friend and colleague. Mr. Lewis lent me a number of photographs of Lily Lewis and her family, several of which portray an enthusiastic and determinedlooking young woman who can easily be imagined 14

Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

abroad on her own for the first time, living in a pension like the one L.L. describes in one of her columns from Paris, and trying her hand for the first time at the profession in which she subsequently will make her own living. Others reveal what might very well be a slightly older and bolder New Woman, now a celebrated world traveller and newspaper correspondent. As the journey progresses, Lewis’s voice becomes increasingly strong and distinctive; then it begins to fade and eventually disappears well before the end of the tour. Louis Lloyd and Garth Grafton describe Lewis’s and Duncan’s experiences as they cross Canada on the Canadian Pacific Railway, from the vantage point of the train and from a variety of somewhat less limited perspectives during stop-overs in Winnipeg, where they visited Lily’s brother Lansing, in Moosomin and Regina, at a glacier in the Selkirks, and in Vancouver, where they remained for a couple of weeks before taking a steamer to Japan in December. As they comment on their fellow travelers, among whom are a number of immigrants bound for new homes on the prairies, the settlers they visit on the prairies, their hosts in Winnipeg and Regina, and some Indians they encounter in various places along the way,9 both Lloyd and Grafton participate in a number of popular Canadian discourses, reflecting and no doubt contributing to some common stereotypes, and resisting others. A letter from Sara Duncan to Lansing Lewis provides a rare glimpse of the actual Lily Lewis at this time. An article in the Regina Leader describing the travellers’ visit to that city adds an historical dimension to Lloyd’s and Grafton’s accounts. Towards the end of the Canadian portion of the tour, conscious artistry becomes a discernible element of many of Louis Lloyd’s sketches. Introduction Recovering Lily Lewis

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From Vancouver, for example, she presents a brilliant vignette about an overnight hunting expedition that imaginatively participates in domestic discourses of nationhood and settlement and at the same time draws on Lewis’s earlier immersion in international concerns. The beauty and charm of Japan inspired both writers to produce some of their best impressionistic work; like L.L.’s earlier sketches from Italy but with greater sophistication, both Louis Lloyd’s and Garth Grafton’s columns from Japan echo writers like Ruskin and James as the travellers portray themselves moving through ever-changing scenes coloured by delicate mists and lanterns and moonlight. Humorous anecdotes convey the fun the two were having. And as in her Vancouver vignette, an element of fiction enlivens Lloyd’s narratives about her Japanese friends. Lewis and Duncan left Japan late in January 1889, and after short stops in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Penang, spent several weeks in Ceylon, and sailed on to Calcutta at the end of February. They visited Madras, Bombay, and Agra, and in March, they headed for the Suez and Cairo, and arrived in London on 1 May 1889.10 Duncan’s accounts in the Star and in her novel deal as extensively with the latter part of the tour as with the earlier part, but only three articles by Lloyd appear after the women left Japan. Two letters to her family discovered among the Lewis papers correspond to Louis Lloyd’s last two articles from Colombo, Ceylon, and Calcutta. Throughout her writing, Lily Lewis often indirectly expresses a concern about artists and their work being forgotten. L.L.’s nostalgia regarding “crumbling temples” (“Letter from Rome” 21 Apr. 1887) among the Roman ruins and lovely works of art no longer visited or enjoyed in Florence’s 16

Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

Boboli Gardens provides the earliest example. Commenting upon a collection in Montreal of celebrated Canadian artists, Louis Lloyd focuses her attention on two individuals referred to only as “Inconnus” (“Montreal Letter” 29 Dec. 1887). In her letter to her family from Ceylon, Lewis directly expresses her anxiety about the possibility that her writing might fail. Attempts to remain visible as a public writer appear in a variety of forms in her later work. Back in Paris in the summer of 1889 while describing the Paris Exposition for Canadian readers, Louis Lloyd subtly but explicitly links her current persona with her earlier L.L. In 1895 and 1896, now writing as Lily Lewis Rood, Lewis again, but much less directly, refers her international readers back to an earlier time when she was writing more prolifically under her Canadian pen name Louis Lloyd. Aside from Louis Lloyd’s articles from Paris in the summer of 1889, Lloyd’s articles about “Parisian Personalities” in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1890, the notice of Lewis’s marriage in 1891, and a photograph from Italy in Herbert Lewis’s collection showing a young woman in a jaunty straw hat, inscribed “Lansing and Katie, with love, Lily,” and dated “1892,” Lily Lewis disappears, in terms of my research, until 1895, when her book on Puvis de Chavannes was published by Prang & Co. of Boston, and the article about de Chavannes appeared in the journal Modern Art. The sketches of Parisian artists, like L.L.’s earlier columns, have roots in Canada. The Paris art community figured prominently in Canadian novels of the New Woman, just as it did in numerous columns in The Week. However, these works by Lewis must also be read in the context of international discourses surrounding the New Woman.

Introduction Recovering Lily Lewis

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Outside Canada, and in writing and on the stage, the New Woman presented a more rebellious challenge to existing social structures and values than did the Canadian version. While the actual New Woman often encountered great enough difficulty maintaining some respectability and making ends meet in the face of severe opposition, she faced an even greater threat from the fiction about the New Woman that proliferated everywhere in Europe and America in the 1890s. Many scholars interested in the New Woman and her fictional counterpart have suggested that the actual New Woman – the woman simply seeking a career and a degree of independence – lost credibility and virtually disappeared because the New Woman depicted in fiction tended so often to be extreme and generally reprehensible, such a threat to moral decency and social stability that she had either to be corrected or destroyed by the author who created her. Sara Jeannette Duncan’s 1894 novel about a New Woman, A Daughter of Today, follows this pattern precisely, and in the process indirectly disparages the woman whom its heroine so closely resembles in many specific ways – the Lily Lewis who lived in Paris and wrote about artists and their work. In A Social Departure, Duncan’s choice to present her travel account as a light social comedy of manners in a way erases the “actual” Louis Lloyd by replacing her with the fictional and rather silly “Orthodocia.” In A Daughter of Today, the actual Lily Lewis disappears as a character resembling her in terms of sharing her experiences again becomes a fictional type. Lily Lewis Rood presents a more positive version of her own life in her sketch of Puvis de Chavannes as she indirectly includes a sketch of herself, the Canadian expatriate journalist, observing and talking with the 18

Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

accomplished French artist she admires. A sadder picture of Lily Lewis’s Bohemian life emerges from the documents and letters pertaining to her later years in England, one that poignantly articulates the difficulty of sustaining a life as an emancipated Canadian woman in the early years of the twentieth century. The final two items of Lily Lewis’s writing that I have been able to locate, two prose poems published in the New York Bookman in 1896, seem to anticipate the fading out of a woman. In both poems, a woman appears for a moment and then disappears, into a fog in one case, and into a crowd in a railway station in the other, leaving behind only a trace, rather as Lewis herself seems to have done at this point in her career. The vagueness of the disappearing figure in both poems, its inability fully to materialize in both cases, corresponds, perhaps, to Lily Lewis’s own difficulties establishing a career and her subsequent disappearance after a brief moment as a writer. Here, Lewis Rood uses poetic images to connect her present writing self with her earlier ones. Ironically, the two poems almost literally disappeared in the process of my discovering them in the periodicals archive at Library and Archives Canada. Many of these journals from the 1890s are falling apart. The ink comes off the pages at the slightest touch. The pages in the volume I was working with actually began to crumble as I handled them. By the time I had photocopied the pages containing the poems, it was impossible to read the title and date of the journal. Five days later, the volume was still on the shelf where I had left it. I do not know whether it was ever returned to its place in the archives. My goal in creating this volume is to try to reclaim Lily Lewis’s place in Canadian literary Introduction Recovering Lily Lewis

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history. I situate myself among those scholars wishing to recover lost voices of early Canadian women writers, several of whom are represented in Lorraine McMullen’s anthology Re(dis)covering Our Foremothers. Concerned with recovering works once known and subsequently forgotten and those never known, with valorizing genres outside of fiction or poetry, and with thinking in new ways about styles that have been denigrated, McMullen states her wish to “bridge the gap between the creative and the critical” (Introduction 1), and this, too, I wish to do. In terms of genre, the volume hovers somewhere between a critical edition and a critical study. It relates what I have learned of Lily Lewis’s story, critically situates her writing relative to that of her contemporaries, and presents a substantial selection of her writing. I shall make a modest claim about the literary value of Lewis’s writing. While her work occupies a very small literary space, I nevertheless see in it numerous “moments that impress,”11 that make this work worth reading for its own sake. In compiling the selection of Lily Lewis’s writing that appears in Part Three, I have included entire texts in some cases and excerpts from texts in others. These samples elucidate the opinions, ideas, and preoccupations that I see in her texts. They reveal the influence of earlier writers and they relate in specific ways to the work of later writers. They add to our knowledge of the contexts, both national and international, in which she lived and wrote. Read in conjunction with work by those of her contemporaries with whom her work is most closely associated (notably Duncan, and to a lesser extent, Alice Jones), they tell us something about Lewis’s own life, and about the lives of other women writers of her time and place. They 20

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illustrate the extent to which Lily Lewis contributed to ideas of both “Canadianness” and “new womanhood” in an international context at the fin de siècle. Part Two, “Reading Lily Lewis: A Biocritical Study,” combines biography, literary history, and literary criticism. In this section I look more closely at Lily Lewis’s texts in conjunction with her times, with the work of her predecessors and contemporaries, and with her personal story. The story of how she became lost is a necessary element of the process of putting her back in the picture. Finally, to answer some questions about why this writer has remained lost for so long, I look briefly at some trends and biases in contemporary literary and feminist criticism. Henry Morgan’s Types of Canadian Women of 1903 contains biographies and photographs of what he deemed the professionally and socially important Canadian women at the turn of the nineteenth century. Lily Lewis is absent from this volume. The photographs of Lily and her family, kindly lent to me by Herbert Lewis, imaginatively overturn this omission. Notes from diaries her brother Lansing kept as a teenager, Lily’s letters written to her family during the world tour, the previously unknown letter from Duncan to Lily’s brother Lansing, and pertinent newspaper articles all help to piece together a sketch, a partial picture of Lily Lewis. Excerpts from legal documents and family correspondence, including a letter written by her brother Albert talking about “the trouble he and Lily have caused the family,” tell us something about her troubles and conflicts in the late Eighteen Nineties. Photographs courtesy of Broadmoor Hospital contrast sadly with the earlier ones taken in Montreal and Italy. British medical records, correspondence between Introduction Recovering Lily Lewis

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a much older Lansing and authorities at the institutions where Lily spent her later years, and notes written by Lily Lewis Rood herself while living in these institutions, help to illuminate the role that circumstances involving her family played in Lewis’s final disappearance from the public scene. I see this volume as a sketch of Lily Lewis, and, as such, as a form of women’s life writing. The sketch form originally gave Lewis a voice in the literary expression of her time. For her and others like her, it became a vehicle for working within the norms of society while resisting many of the strictures imposed upon the “New Woman” who chose to live abroad and work as a writer. This composite sketch allows Lewis’s voice to begin to be heard again. With its blurred edges and momentary clarities, its open-endedness and its disregard of boundaries, the sketch remains an appropriate form in which to present the incomplete story and partially recovered work of this almost-forgotten and still-mysterious woman and writer.

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Notes to Part One 1 This misspelling resulted in a long search for a nonexistent periodical. Galignani’s Messenger (1814–95) was a well-known English-language daily newspaper published in Paris, and continued as The Daily Messenger (1896–1904). 2 Fowler’s book is regarded with circumspection among scholars as an accurate historical or biographical account, because many of the scenarios she describes derive from speculations based on Duncan’s fictional writing. Any further references to this work will be made with this consideration in mind. 3 In Women Who Made the News, Lang refers briefly to Lewis as Duncan’s companion on the world tour (27– 28). 4 Who’s Who in Canada (1980–81) 576–77. 5 Among the Lewis family papers is a note about a daughter born to John and Matilda Lewis, 30 October 1866, and the inscription on the Lewis cemetery monument lists Lily Lewis Rood’s birthdate as 1866. The Broadmoor Hospital admission files, however, list Lily Lewis Rood’s birthdate as 1867. 6 Fowler’s assertion that Lewis moved to Paris at this precise time might be a speculation based on the fact that Duncan left the Gower Street flat at this time and Lewis’s first article from Paris appeared in the Star on 8 June. 7 Lily Lewis Rood uses the form “de Chavannes” as short for the name of painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, but other authorities, like the Catholic Encyclopedia, and Aimée Brown Price in her monograph on the artist, use the form “Puvis.” In most cases throughout this volume, I use “Puvis de Chavannes,” but to keep my practice consistent with Lewis Rood’s, I occasionally shorten this to “de Chavannes.” 8 In Paddling Her Own Canoe. See “The Canadian New Woman” 59–62. 9 I use “Indian” here in the sense of Daniel Francis’s “Imaginary Indian,” a collective image of North American indigenous people constructed by Europeans in the nineteenth century. See Francis,

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The Imaginary Indian, “Chapter One: Introduction” 1–9. 10 In her final column describing the tour, Duncan writes, “[T]he England of May Day stretched green under our prow; and we sailed ... up the brown Thames to London” (“From Egypt to England”). 11 In his well-known essay, “In Praise of Talking Dogs: The Study and Teaching of Early Canada’s Canonlesss Canon,” Nick Mount asserts that early Canadian writing offers few such moments.

Part Two

READING LILY LEWIS A Biocritical Study

L.L.

Paris Correspondent Beginning with her column of 3 January 1886, L.L. initially replaces someone signing him/herself “Z” as the author of The Week’s “Our Paris Letter.” Speaking sometimes from a gender-neutral position and at other times from a distinctly feminine one, L.L. at first simply follows Z’s pattern of writing about Parisian political and cultural matters that might be of interest to readers, male or female, of The Week. Like Z, and the “Gs” and “XYZs” and “ARTs” who also authored columns at the time, she says nothing to reveal her actual identity. While L.L.’s sketches tend to address matters of international interest, they nevertheless engage with some Canadian preoccupations and, occasionally, they reveal bits of personal information about Lily Lewis herself. And although the sketches participate in a number of typically Canadian discussions, the views Lewis expresses in them are often quite unconventional for their time, and in some ways seem quite modern today. L.L.’s portrait of her “Paris Pension” provides the information that enabled me to identify this writer as Lily Lewis. She describes her accommodation as “a perfect nest of artists,” with its “eight pianos, two violins and five cantatrices all going at once.” Around the dinner table she places the requisite types: the “coquettish” landlady, related (as they always are) to a count, the husband of dubious class, the “shiftless” Russian, the “argumentative little English correspondent,” several “dashing[ly] assert[ive]” Americans, and the writer, herself, “the solitary Canadian.” The establishment, L.L. says, “is saved by its situation”: 28

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The view from the windows of [the] … fifth étage is unsurpassed in Paris. [Across the square] flows the Seine [s]ous les mille falots assise en souveraine. To the west, ris[es] … the Hill of Meudon, dotted with white villas; to the south, that vast sea of houses above which towers the domes of Les Invalides, and the Panthéon; and far away to the east, through a veil of mist, Notre Dame; to the north, the heights of Montmartre; and one has only to walk out on one’s balcony to view this magnificent panorama. (6 May 1886)

Louis Lloyd revisits the location/motif two years later to establish the most explicit connection that exists between Lewis’s two personae. Back in Paris after the tour with Duncan and commenting upon the Paris Exposition of that summer in a Montreal Star column, Lloyd remarks, “The Paris of to-day will jar upon you should you have left it two years ago in the sleepy dignity of a June afternoon.” She writes of having gone “to see Madame at the Pension” and finding both Madame and the Pension much changed. The modest Pension de Famille had become “Hotel__,” and as she discovered after climbing the five flights of steps, her “dear, dirty little room” was no longer either dirty or affordable. Its view of “a myriad chimneypots” (“In Holiday Attire” 9 June 1889) had remained unchanged, however, and remains consistent with the view described earlier by L.L. The two sketches together definitively identify L.L. as Lewis. L.L.’s sketch of her Parisian pension also allows Lewis to engage in a dialogue popular among nineteenth-century Canadian travellers to Paris. EvaMarie Kröller suggests that much as Canadians tended to explore London “with Charles Dickens’s novels in hand,” visitors “roamed through Paris READING LILY LEWIS A Biocritical Study

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guided by Victor Hugo’s colourful evocations of medieval life in the French capitol in Notre Dame de Paris” (Canadian Travellers in Europe 129), often with the express purpose of denouncing Paris’s increasing secularity. Common in Canadian travellers’ descriptions of Paris, Kröller states, is the “bird’s eye view” (129), a set-piece modelled on “Paris à vol d’oiseau,” a section of the third book of Hugo’s volume. The observer’s glance travels from symbols of worldliness – le dome des Invalides, le Palais Luxembourg, and le Quartier Latin – toward such symbols of Paris’s Christian origins as the Panthéon or Notre Dame. A travers l’Europe, Quebec Roman Catholic Judge Adolphe-Basil Routhier’s account of an eightmonth stay in Paris in 1881, for example, describes just such a scene in a carefully crafted complaint about Parisian modernity. While we cannot know if Lewis was familiar with Routhier’s book, her fifth-floor view certainly seems to participate in the same discourse. Lewis presents a secular alternative to Routhier’s more common Canadian stance, concluding her piece with Montmartre, a place of art and artists. This focus on the secular, with an emphasis on the value of art, in fact strongly characterizes all of Lewis’s writing. Information about Lewis and some examples of her independent opinions emerge throughout her other Parisian columns. L.L. writes about a “Reprise” of Hugo’s Marion de Lorme starring Sarah Bernhardt and featuring “that lovely Miserere of Massenet” (“Paris Letter” 11 Feb. 1886), and about Sardou’s Georgette and Daudet’s Sapho, sympathizing with the heroines of all three works. She writes about waiting for a personal interview with Franz Liszt – a “little music student” in awe of the great composer – and rushing to kiss his hand in “a pardonable burst of enthusiasm” 30

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(“Paris Letter” 22 Apr. 1886) when he arrived. She also describes having attended a “charming little exhibition” (“Paris Letter” 13 May 1886) that includes paintings by the artist Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, about whom Lily Lewis Rood nine years later published a monograph. She admires the advances the French have made in women’s education, especially the fact that “the convent is practically a thing of the past” (“Paris Letter” 22 July 1886), and she praises the educated Frenchwoman for remaining “the coquette” instead of “degenerat[ing] into the spectacled, corsetless blue-stocking” (“Paris Letter” 5 Aug. 1886) so prevalent elsewhere. She writes of visiting cafes frequented by Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot, and at times she simply portrays herself loitering amidst the pleasures of summertime in Paris. In one column, for example, L.L. describes taking a leisurely drive along the Seine on a late August evening to a little restaurant in the woods near Meudon, and later, sipping iced champagne with her companions in chairs on top of the train on the way home. Adopting an attitude contrary to that of many Canadians, L.L. writes positively about the hugely controversial naturalist writer Émile Zola. (In A Purer Taste, Carole Gerson quotes some of the “pejorative adjectives” [28] that contributors to The Week use to describe Zola and/or his work: “repulsive”; “slimy”; “debased” [25]; “the worst garbage of modern literature” [29]).1 She similarly praises the scientist Paul Bert, often reviled by Canadians for his practice of vivisection, for his development of safe anaesthesia and his contribution to women’s education (“Paul Bert” 7 Apr. 1887).

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A Tour of Switzerland and Italy As L.L. castigates the French for their refusal to travel, she reveals the importance of travel in the upper- and upper-middle-class Canadian imagination. It was most common for elite young Canadians to complete their education with a trip to Europe, and this indeed seems to have been the case with Lily Lewis. I have learned very little about Lewis’s life prior to her appearance in print as L.L. The photographs in Illustrations 1 and 2 show her as a child and as a young teenager, respectively. The Lewis papers include a number of diaries that Lily’s brother Lansing kept in his teens, and several of these mention his having “bought Lillie ice cream,” “a stuffed bird,” and “some fireworks.” Herbert Lewis located two books that Lily received as rewards for academic achievement, one inscribed “Lily Amy Lewis, First Division, June, 1875” and the other “Lily Lewis, Third Division, June, 1881.” On the flyleaf of a volume of Tennyson’s poems is written, “Lillie Lewis from her Papa and Mama, Xmas, 1880.” Lansing writes in an 1879 entry that “Ma and Lilly left for Portsmouth,” suggesting that Lily travelled, perhaps quite extensively, with her family during her youth. Records indicate that Lansing and Albert Edward attended “Dr. Carpenter’s,” an all-male private high school,2 and I can only speculate that Lily was privately 1 Lily Lewis as a little girl. Montreal, undated. Courtesy of Herbert Lewis.(previous page) 2 Lily Lewis as a young girl. Montreal, undated. Courtesy of Herbert Lewis.(previous page) 3 Lily Lewis as a young woman. Montreal, undated. Courtesy of Herbert Lewis.

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educated as well,3 and was perhaps continuing her studies in Paris in 1886. The flyleaf of the Third Division book prize cites proficiency in Latin and all facets of French study. In one of her Parisian sketches, L.L. alludes to herself as “a little music student,” and in a diary entry dated June 12, 1879, Lansing notes, “Lillie played recital at her examination today.” Lansing’s obituary (“Lansing Lewis Worthy Citizen Laid to Rest”) attests to his having been an accomplished musician himself, making the likelihood of Lily’s studying music in Paris all the more plausible. An article in a Regina newspaper in 1888 refers to Lewis as “a linguist” able to converse in both French and German (“Seeing the Country”), and both Louis Lloyd’s and Garth Grafton’s columns describing the world tour confirm this. L.L.’s erudite vocabulary and mature writing style, together with her familiarity with influential writers, further attest to a solid and comprehensive educational background. A six-months’ tour of Switzerland and Italy would provide a logical completion to Lewis’s European education. The photograph in Illustration 3 would have been taken during Lily’s high school years, and I like to imagine the photograph in Illustration 4 as representing Lily at about the time she left Montreal for Paris in 1886. According to Edmund Swinglehurst in his history of Cook’s Tours, burgeoning tour companies like Cook’s had developed, by the mid-1870s, a hugely successful tour of Switzerland and Italy modeled approximately on the itinerary of the Grand Tour undertaken by the leisured classes

4 Lily Lewis. Montreal, undated. Courtesy of Herbert Lewis.

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of England in the eighteenth century but boasting more comforts and conveniences. L.L.’s entries suggest a similar itinerary: she spent time in Geneva and then Montreux in Switzerland, and travelled through Italy more or less from north to south, ending her tour in Rome, and visiting Milan, Venice, Bologne, Florence, Sorrento, and Naples en route. As guidebooks proliferated in response to the growing popularity of tourism, they came to occupy an increasingly central position in shaping travellers’ responses to their European experience. As a consequence, travellers inevitably talk about the impossibility of recording an original response to any of the places they visit, and L.L.’s accounts from Switzerland are especially derivative. “In a country so thoroughly, and so often, pictured by travellers, poets, and artists,” she complains, “one may with reason despair of finding an unsketched nook” (“From Paris to Switzerland” 4 Nov. 1886). She writes as countless others have of seeing Mont Blanc “bathed with the last rays of sunlight,” of “delicate mists” around Clarens, and of Chillon standing “cruel and grave” (“Letter from Switzerland” 11 Nov. 1886). She writes of “discovering with pleasure” the names of Byron, George Sand, Eugène Sue, and Dumas in the dungeon at Chillon (11 Nov.), and of musing about “fair Julie” at “the home of La Nouvelle Héloïse” (“Letter from Switzerland” 2 Dec. 1886). Louis Lloyd’s later response to the Canadian Rockies attests to the strength of this habit of observing through prior associations. With no associative connections upon which to shape her descriptions, all Lloyd can say is “It was Switzerland without her history … [and] [t]herefore the Rockies leave me cold” (“Louis Lloyd’s Letter” 14 Dec. 1888).

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Culture, not sunshine, drew travellers to Italy in the nineteenth century, and the publishers of guidebooks capitalized on all of Italy’s historical, artistic, and literary connections as they did on Switzerland’s Romantic legacy. Layers of literary references contribute to the atmosphere L.L. evokes as she describes a dark, murky, and dreamlike Venice experienced in the dead of winter: [F]or the few wanderers of this colder season [Venice] makes no effort to hide the deep melancholy which hangs over her like some sad mist .… It is neither moonlight nor May. A drizzling rain falls. The few lamps flicker faintly. The water in the canal is very dark, and the gondola very hearselike. One fears to speak above a whisper. All the weird beauty seems of such stuff that dreams are made of [sic], and our first journey through this city of the dead, a Dantesque expedition indeed. (“Letter from Italy” 13 Jan. 1887)

She creates an ambivalent atmosphere around the canal to set the stage for a subsequent contemplation of the places where Byron and the Capulets lived, Wagner died, and Dante spent his exile. Four years later, in describing for The Week what she calls the “curious unreality” of Venice, the Canadian writer Alice Jones muses about how, here, one’s consciousness tends to “tangle together fact and fiction in the most shameless fashion.” Heroes, doges, and artists “are apt to get merged in the golden mist of romance that encircles Desdemona and Othello and Shylock”: Stageland, … the name of one of Jerome Jerome’s clever sketches, somehow … fits itself in my fancy to Venice. Stageland – dreamland READING LILY LEWIS A Biocritical Study

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– the land where it is always afternoon – which of them is it, this wondrous place that is not country, with its absence this April day of all fresh green life, that is not town, with its fresh ripple and splash of water, its breath and light of the sea … that fixes “stageland” in the mind as especially applicable to the Piazza as background to Venetian history.

This sketch begins with a contemplation of tide water washing onto marble steps: Those marble steps somehow fascinate me, When the sea is up over them and long green weeds wave softly, they seem to come up from blue-green depths of mystery that tell of stealthy black gondolas stealing up to midnight meetings, of sullen plunges that hide the traces of crime, of all sorts of old tales of medieval wickedness. (“Stray Thoughts in Venice” 29 May 1891)

That Shakespeare and Dante, mystery and fantasy, and Machiavellian intrigue converge to produce a degree of similarity in L.L.’s and Jones’s reactions to Venice can be attributed to some extent to images generated by tourism. The level of creativity apparent in their literary associations – L.L.’s intertextual link between Shakespeare’s midsummer dream in The Tempest and her own weird and dreamlike midwinter gondola ride, for example, and Jones’s appropriation of Jerome K. Jerome’s “Stage-Land”4 to evoke the similarly dreamlike atmosphere that she later perceives in Venice – illustrates the extent to which such associations had become a literary device in travel writing before the turn of the century and exemplifies the skill both writers had acquired at working

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in the genre. It perhaps also suggests a more direct influence of L.L.’s work upon Jones’s. Echoes of Henry James’s Italian Sketches resonate in both L.L.’s and Jones’s vignettes. James encapsulates the magic and mystery that this city evokes as he concludes his famous essay, “Venice” of 1884: “the leading colour in the Venetian concert … is a faint, shimmering, airy, watery pink: the bright sea-light seems to flush with it, and the pale whitish green of lagoon and canal to drink it in” (17). Jones’s depiction of the watery atmosphere of the city echoes his very similar description of wave-washed steps, and a less romantic version of his “patch of green water and a surface of pink wall” (17) reappears in a later description of Montreal’s Italian community by Lewis’s Louis Lloyd. James notes that the Venetian scene speaks to him of the mysteries of Udolfo, alluding with the title of Ann Radcliff’s gothic novel to all the vague unspecified assumptions of dangers and romantically villainous characters that the later writers continue to conjure using their own literary associations. L.L.’s and Jones’s Italian impressions also reveal the influence of John Ruskin, especially in the way in which their aesthetic perception encompasses movement and change,5 and two corresponding vignettes describing Christmas in Florence again suggest that L.L.’s travel sketches might have influenced Jones’s. Referring to Jones as “a Ruskinite in Canada” (Canadian Travellers in Europe 82), Eva Marie Kröller points to how, in her “Florentine Vignette” of 1892, Jones “sketches the tints and shapes of a winter sunset over Florence … as a process and transitory moment” (85) rather than as a completed artifact:

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On Christmas Eve we climbed the steep curves that wind up the slopes of San Miniato, and just as the red flush was creeping over the mountains, reached the terrace before the church, and stood looking down on the domes and spires of the city, and on the hills that enclose it. A blue vapour hung over the town, through which the great dome of the cathedral rose majestic, and the turreted tower of the Palazzo Vecchio soared. (Jones, “Florentine Vignettes” 5 Feb. 1892)

On a Christmas morning in Florence five years earlier, L.L. rather similarly invites her readers to join her and ascend “the gently winding” Via dei Colli, and then step with her out onto “a projecting terrace” and experience the entire panorama: “the church with the adjoining convents, and the little cemetery” rising above, the Arno stretching below, and far off, the mountains acting as sentinels. The scene remains a completed artifact – “the most charming of pictures in the fittest of frames” – for only a moment, before a “blue mist” creeps up from the valley and begins to obscure parts of the picture (“Letter from Italy” 17 Feb. 1887). Guidebooks inadvertently constructed for tourists an image of Italians as childlike, deceitful, irresponsible, and somewhat gaudy, an image that became so entrenched in the Canadian imagination that prejudice against Italian immigration continued long after the turn of the century. Several of Lewis’s sketches portray Italians in just this way. L.L. writes of “this child-like nation” and “these dear, interesting, picturesque, lovable, lying Italians,” whose “soft glorious eyes” and “exquisitely musical tongue” produce the same effect as “dangerous ravines, and glint-

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ing torrents,” and are consequently “best seen in the sunlight” (“Letter from Italy” 6 Jan. 1887). The mysterious cloaked figure that represented the medieval Italian in the guidebooks acquires a threatening, albeit picturesque, “aspect” when translated to the modern Italians whom L.L. observes in Verona: The picturesque, toga-like cloak, so popular among Italians of the middle and lower classes, though charming in daylight, has an aspect sinister and threatening enough at night, especially when its wearer moves swiftly and shadow-like through streets dimly lighted, narrow, and mysterious. (“Letter from Italy” 13 Jan. 1887)

Several months later, Louis Lloyd writes about visiting an Italian woman in Montreal. “Nobody but Italians could inhabit that bright pink house with the pale green shutters,” she says. Inside, “some unsavory vegetable soup simmers on the fire,” the husband snores from the bedroom, and “unwashed imps” complete the scene (“Montreal Letter” 2 Aug. 1888). L.L. bids farewell to Florence with a description of its Boboli Gardens that directly echoes James and at the same time indirectly alludes to Ruskin. “One must linger in [these deserted grounds] at twilight, when all is still, or visit them on a winter’s afternoon while the mists flit about their paths and groves like the ghosts of past joys,” she claims. “These gardens … seem like graves of so many delightful pleasures – dead forever.… Le mond s’est fait vieux, alas!” (“Letter from Italy” 7 Apr. 1887). Henry James’s earlier response to these same gardens conveys a similar sentiment as he describes “these pleasure-grounds … so

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rough-hewn and yet somehow elegantly balanced” (“Florentine Notes” 424), with their “mouldy statues” (424), “mildewed sculpture[s]” and “dried up fountain” (425). He sees here “a fanciful formalism”(425) that gives style to the garden’s shabbiness, and he appreciates the “shady vistas” (425) where one may “wander … on grey and melancholy days” (426) and get “a sense of history that takes [one’s] breath away” (427). The place contains, he concludes, the “traditional taste of Florence” (426). Always acutely aware of Ruskin as a predecessor to whom he must pay tribute and from whose oppressive influence he must sometimes escape, James effects a Ruskinian use of the picturesque as a counter to the cold utilitarianism of modernity, and so does L.L. L.L.’s sketches from Italy strongly suggest that Lily Lewis was not only “a little music student” and a fledgling newspaper correspondent and travel writer, but also an aspiring art critic. In A Wider Range, Maria Frawley talks about how cosmopolitan experience, rather than education, allowed British Victorian women to write with an authority previously restricted to educated men. Positioning themselves as travellers enabled women writers to participate in the generally accepted Arnoldian project of helping to shape their society’s values through their expression of artistic taste. L.L.’s opening remarks about Rome express this idea directly: “Taste and sentiment … should be cultivated to the highest degree; for we have need for all that is best in us … by the subtle perceptions that art can bestow … upon even a Philistine” (“Letter from Rome” 21 Apr. 1887).6 Many of L.L.’s accounts also suggest that Lewis, like Alice Jones, considered herself a contributor to what Richard Stein calls “the literature of art”

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(Stein 1): a new literary genre created and demonstrated by Victorian writers Ruskin, Walter Pater, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, focussing on the fine arts and aimed at creating a better society by enhancing appreciation of the arts. In her impressions of the churches, statues, and paintings of Florence and Venice, L.L. articulates Lewis’s belief in the power of art to bring out the noblest impulses of humanity. As she comments at length about her impressions of famous paintings, L.L.’s criticism strikes a secular note that particularly conforms to Walter Pater’s humanistic approach to art.7 She appreciates the beautiful Madonnas in the Ufizzi Palace and the allegorical representations in the Baptistry, but she also sees “the divinest beauty” in the “magnificent Niobe group” that includes some of the most precious antique sculptures in existence (“Letter from Italy” 3 Mar. 1887). As L.L. focuses on the subject of the artist rather than religion in her response to three paintings portraying women, her account suggests that Lewis might have been familiar with Anna Jameson’s mid-nineteenth-century masterwork of European art criticism, Sacred and Legendary Art. In Legends of the Madonna, a volume of this work, Jameson deals comprehensively and from a feminist perspective with representations of the Madonna and the Magdalen in Italian art, pointedly shifting her own focus towards the Magdalen. L.L. moves in another direction, towards the artist. The Madonna of Titian’s Assumption, the Santa Barbara of Palma Vecchio, and Raphael’s “exquisite” Santa Cecilia, the musician, she says, all represent “some dizzy mountain summit” in the world of art. Significantly, the third, “the sensitive artist soul, alive to every beauty

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in earth and heaven,” is “perhaps the dearest of all” (“Letter from Italy” 3 Feb. 1887). L.L.’s focus here resonates with her similar shift from religion to secularity and the artist in her “bird’s eye view” from the pension in Paris. Like many other contributors to The Week, L.L. finds Rome’s narrow streets unpleasant.8 Nevertheless, she invites her readers to join her in exploring them. “Trace with me these ruins,” she suggests, adopting the style of Mary Mitford’s popular “country rambles”: 9 “Every here and there [in these narrow, ugly streets] we find with delight a column, a frieze, some exquisite piece of work” (“Letter from Rome” 21 Apr. 1887). Interestingly, considering Lily Lewis’s advocacy of secularity in most things, especially pertaining to women, L.L. writes sympathetically about convent life in Italy. Contemplating the Temple of Vesta in Rome, and the Convent of the Vestal Virgins, she says, “[L]ike their modern sisters, the Vestals of ancient times discovered behind seemingly uncompromising walls a life still lovely, though dreamier, and with more quiet joys” (“Letter from Rome” 12 May 1887). Despite their occasional delight, however, the Roman ruins seem to have had a profoundly melancholy effect upon Lily Lewis, and L.L. portrays them with a strange analogy: I have seen somewhere a beautifully imagined representation of Hades, a sort of aesthetic Hades, not hideous with vulgar flames and rude noise, but filled with crumbling temples – the shattered life works of a hundred poor souls! Does the scene before you not seem a little like this? The tomorrow of human greatness – and yet, and yet not so, for the best part of it lives on

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in the world’s brave, struggling hearts. (“Letter from Rome” 21 Apr. 1887)

This kind of nostalgia for artistic efforts that do not last recurs often in Lewis’s writing.

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Louis Lloyd

Montreal Correspondent Five months after L.L.’s final column from Rome, Louis Lloyd appears in The Week for the first time as the author of a four-line poem translated “From the French of François Coppée” (10 Nov. 1887) and her initial “Montreal Letter” column. I can with reason speculate that Lewis visited England and Wales during the summer of 1887 prior to her return to Montreal. In her first column describing the world tour in 1888, Duncan’s Garth Grafton introduces her companion as “Louis who has been in England” (“Winnipeg Whisperings” 6 Oct. 1888) and Lloyd says something in her corresponding column about having become “rather satiated with French gardens and English parks” (“Louis Lloyd’s Letters” 11 Oct. 1888). Writing about a Welsh concert in Montreal, Lloyd adds, “If you have ever spent any time in Wales you will know what such an entertainment means” (“Montreal Letter” 1 Dec. 1887). Lewis’s father was born in Wales, and Sir Herbert Lewis, who later became a Welsh member of the British Parliament, was John Lewis’s first cousin. According to the later Herbert Lewis, the families were close, and Lily’s family stayed with Sir Herbert whenever they travelled to Wales. (Herbert Lewis’s close friend and fellow Welsh parliamentarian Lloyd George later became Prime Minister of Great Britain, and also later became a peripheral figure in the troubles Lily encountered.) Perhaps Lily visited both England and Wales before returning to Montreal in 1888. The pen name Louis Lloyd itself relates closely to Lewis’s own identity. Anglophone readers would pronounce “Louis” as “Lewis.” Notes in the Lewis papers identify Lewis’s maternal 50

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grandmother as “Dame Mary Lloyd” and refer to a Hoyes Lloyd Snowdon as Lily’s mother’s brother. Moving from the strict anonymity of the “Zs” and “L.L.’s” who authored the “Paris Letters” and “London Letters,” Lloyd joins the noms de plume of a variety of Canadian women journalists who had begun to carve a place for themselves in the profession writing local columns. Examples include Agnes Maule Machar’s “Fidelis,” Frances Harrison’s “Seranus,” “Amaryllis,” the Ottawa social commentator only recently identified by Sandra Gwyn as Agnes Scott,10 and, of course, Duncan’s Garth Grafton. Lloyd, like Grafton, wears her disguise lightly, making no attempt to hide either her gender or her identity. Presumably because newspapers’ policies still insisted on the anonymity of the “Zs” and “L.L.s,” Lewis does not directly link Lloyd to L.L., but she drops numerous hints. When she writes about a violinist who “has taken up his abode amongst us,” she adds, “I have heard him very enthusiastically applauded by a Paris audience” (Lloyd, “Montreal Letter” 17 Nov. 1887). In a discussion about the duty levied on French wines, she alludes to having “sip[ped] those ambiguous decoctions ‘compris’ with board at many Parisian Pensions” (“Montreal Letter” 28 June 1888). Similar verbal constructions less explicitly connect Lewis’s two personae. Louis Lloyd describes the aftermath of a winter fire in Montreal as a “beautiful and weird” scene, reminiscent “now of Dante’s favorite haunts, now of a theatrical conflagration” (“Montreal Letter” 26 Jan. 1888). With the word “theatrical” she alludes to the earlier “Dantesque” expedition in Venice, where L.L. emphasizes the unreality of this experience with a reference to Shakespeare’s “stuff that dreams are made of” (L.L., “Letter from READING LILY LEWIS A Biocritical Study

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Italy” 13 Jan. 1887). L.L. quotes Shakespeare’s Fool in King Lear (and Feste in Twelfth Night) to complain in Paris that “The rain, it raineth every day! Rain for the Bataille de Fleurs, … rain for the Grand Prix” (“Paris Letter” 24 June 1886). It raineth every day again, “Alas!” in Montreal, as Louis Lloyd describes another series of sodden public events (“Montreal Letter” 22 Dec. 1887). Contemplating the juxtaposition of past and present times in Rome, L.L. ruminates that “instead of a Horace [or] … a Cicero walking by with thoughtful mien, we find a harsh-voiced orange woman or Campagna peasant of bovine aspect” (“Letter from Rome” 2 June 1887). Louis Lloyd similarly uses “bovine” to describe a crowd of East Montrealers attending a picnic (“Montreal Letter” 5 July 1888) and a group of German immigrants on the train (“Louis Lloyd’s Letters” 11 Oct. 1888). Many of the concerns and attitudes that infuse L.L.’s sketches resurface in Louis Lloyd’s. For example, Lloyd recounts a talk by a woman from India who pleaded that “we should not send out missionaries who believed however slightly in women’s inferiority,” and who asked, “Why should man be spoken of as the head of the woman? Why the story of the Fall? Why might women not administer the sacraments?” (“Montreal Letter” 17 May 1888). She objects to a suggestion from a pulpit that because women are entering the labour force, men will become unable to purchase homes for their families (“Montreal Letter” 24 May 1888). As she writes of attending a speech by the New York feminist Mrs. Lillie Devereux Blake, Lloyd includes remarks about how “one’s hilarity” regarding these meetings might “become modified” because of one’s unexpected admiration for this woman. (“Montreal Letter” 3 May 52

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1888). Lewis’s feminist responses, while seldom as radical as her theological ones, are nevertheless often apparent and broadly based. Her opposition to religious fundamentalism seems to have been class- as well as gender-based. Lloyd’s “hilarity” undergoes no “modification,” for example, with respect to the Salvation Army as she describes “the heathenish uproar” created upon the occasion of the Army’s sixth Canadian anniversary. In this case, taste and sophistication preclude admiration. A Hindoo Salvationist, “formerly a thieving drunkard,” “told us all about his conversion,” she says, and adds, Such accounts must always be more or less ghastly to anyone who still retains some fine sentiments, some delicacy. In the present case, however, Mr. Horatulu’s excessive volubility, picturesque appearance, and impish gesticulations were so delightfully entertaining, apart from anything he said, that we quite forgot to be shocked. (“Montreal Letter” 18 Sept. 1888)

Calling herself an “Arnoldian” in another sketch, Lloyd deplores what she sees as bad taste in an American exhibition of Philippoteaux’s Christ Entering Jerusalem. This critique brings together many of Lewis’s ideas about art, religion, class, and taste. With all the purple hangings and gas jets, she complains, “Christ appears, not as an exquisitely intelligent being, … the embodiment of compassion and suffering”; rather, the picture “resembles an ecclesiastical ornament more than anything else” (“Montreal Letter” 6 Sept. 1888). Lloyd’s “Arnoldian” sensibilities, like the “Ruskinian” ones that inform L.L.’s Italian sketches, reflect Lewis’s immersion in Can­ adian as well as international discourses. The READING LILY LEWIS A Biocritical Study

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imperial ideal, a contradictory movement that espoused both nationalist and imperialist principles, greatly influenced Canadian cultural life of the period. According to this concept, Canada would achieve strong nationhood through her ties with the Empire, and, in turn, with her northern strength and her North American independence, she would alter, strengthen, and, some believed, ultimately lead the British Empire to further progress and prosperity. Ties with the Empire relied heavily upon the philosophies of British Victorian writers Matthew Arnold and Thomas Carlyle, especially their belief in the principles of top-down acculturation and their appreciation of all that was deemed “best” in Western culture. Accordingly, the imperial ideal upheld the elitist notion of a superior class whose members exhibit superior manners, sentiments, and taste with respect to their appreciation of the arts.11 The Royal Society, founded in 1882 and influenced heavily by Montreal’s cultural elite, was similarly based on the principle that the fostering and support of literary, visual, and musical art would ultimately produce a strong and distinctly Canadian culture. Hence, perhaps, Lewis’s interest in artists that begins with L.L.’s comments about the Paris Salons, continues with Lloyd’s visits to artists’ studios in Montreal, New York, and Boston, and constitutes the major focus of Lewis Rood’s later work. Lloyd comments knowledgeably and at length about the 5 John Lewis Family. Montreal, undated. Courtesy of Herbert Lewis. From left to right: Ella Lewis, John Lewis, Lansing Lewis, Matilda Lewis, Albert Lewis, Lily Lewis. (previous page) 6 Lily and Albert Lewis. Montreal, undated. Courtesy of Herbert Lewis.

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work of, among others, such still well-known and highly regarded Montreal-based Canadian painters as William Brymner (“Montreal Letter” 9 Feb. 1888), Edmund Morris (“Montreal Letter” 23 Feb. 1888), and Lucien O’Brien (“Montreal Letter” 9 Mar. 1888). Louis Lloyd’s focus extends occasionally to literary commentary and criticism as well. She espouses the importance of international recognition of Canadian writers, citing the case of Montreal poet Louis Fréchette’s recent success in Paris (“Montreal Letter” 9 Feb. 1888) as an example. And while she disparages some of his recent “effusions” as “Clearyism” (“Montreal Letter” 12 Jan. 1888), she nevertheless commends the poet and anthologist W. D. Lighthall, one of the strongest proponents of what later became known as “confederation” literature,12 for his efforts to establish a Canadian literature with a national focus. Like most of her contemporaries in newspaper journalism, including Duncan, Lewis also presents some poetry of her own. Just prior to her initial “Louis Lloyd’s Letters” column describing her trip around the world with Sara Jeannette Duncan’s Garth Grafton, Lloyd displays Lewis’s literary erudition and versatility as the author of a poem entitled “Anacreontic,” modelled on an early Greek poetic form (4 Oct. 1888). The photographs of Lily with her entire family and with her brother Albert, shown in Illustrations 5 and 6, respectively, might have been taken some time during these months she spent back in Montreal. The images suggest a confident and sophisticated young woman who might very well have become accustomed to the pressures and responsibilities of professional journalism, and possess the energy and imagination to embark upon an unchaperoned trip around the world. 58

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Around the World

On

the

“C ipiar”

As the two young women began their journey in the fall of 1888, Lily Lewis’s public profile would have been enhanced by Sara Duncan’s more established reputation. Duncan’s short but stellar career as a journalist had already gained her much attention, and in the spring of 1888 she met and attracted the interest of Joseph Pulitzer, owner of the New York World. Pulitzer’s sponsorship garnered the accounts of the tour continent-wide publicity; consequently, the young women were met by reporters and treated as honoured visitors by community officials at all the major stops along their route. At the same time, some extra-textual items suggest that Lewis enjoyed a certain prominence of her own as a journalist and possessed social connections from which Duncan would have benefited as well. An account in the Regina Leader of 2 October 1888 notes a visit to the city “last week” by “Miss Duncan and Miss Lewis,” each of whom “is well known all over the Dominion by consequence of many a brilliant article” (“Seeing the Country”), confirming that Lewis was indeed better known at that time than subsequently. The account later refers to “Miss Lewis” as “an accomplished linguist” able to converse with both French and German settlers in their respective “tongues.” An announcement in a Winnipeg paper refers to the two visitors to that city as “guests of Captain Lewis.”13 Lily’s brother Lansing lived in Winnipeg between 1880 and 1892, where he operated an insurance company, and in 1888 he was also an aide de camp to the lieutenant governor READING LILY LEWIS A Biocritical Study

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and for a time the Acting Mayor of Winnipeg.14 He had married Katherine Bate of Ottawa in 1887, but she seems not to have been in Winnipeg at the time of Lewis’s and Duncan’s visit. A letter from Duncan to Captain Lewis constitutes one of the very few items of private writing that exist in connection with this trip. Duncan thanks Captain Lewis for a delightful dinner hosted by a group of bachelors she refers to as “the Shantymen,” and goes on to talk about how the manager of the Hotel Vancouver, who happens to know Lily’s father, has given them “a gorgeous suite of rooms” in the hotel.15 Duncan had written about “the Shantymen” in the Star as follows: We found relations of such amity existing that the unexpected friends of a temporary bachelor might be taken to breakfast at an absent neighbor’s.… The Shantymen in brief are a number of young gentlemen who keep bachelor’s hall together, who give dinners and drives in the most charming and formal fashion, and who form an important element in all that is “going on” in a social way in Winnipeg. (“Winnipeg Whisperings” 6 Oct. 1888)

Louis Lloyd concludes her corresponding account of “a charmingly convivial little dinner” with “four enviable hosts” with the remark, “Comfort ye, comfort ye, mothers and sisters who have vague fears concerning the temporal welfare of your idols!” (“Louis Lloyd’s Letters” 11 Oct. 1888). Between these lines, Lily Lewis assures the female members of her own family that Lansing is getting along just fine on his own in Winnipeg. A photograph (see Illustration 9 on p. 87) in the Lewis collection of a stylishly dressed 60

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Lily bears the following inscription: “Lansing and Katie, With Love, Lily. Italy, 2 Nov. 1892.” This, together with the enthusiasm with which Lloyd describes this 1888 visit and Lily’s pleasure in Lansing’s letter as revealed in Sara’s, suggests a warm and intimate sister–brother relationship, one that changed so drastically sometime after 1892 that Lansing barely spoke of his sister to his own children. As in her earlier writing, Lewis’s narrative describing the journey participates in complex and often contradictory ways in the intersecting popular discourses of tourism, feminism, religious secularism, and more notably here, Canadian nationalism.16 Lloyd’s voice also acquires some new dimensions at this point, however, that might well be attributed to Duncan’s influence. Lloyd’s and Grafton’s accounts contain little of the stunt journalism often engaged in by American women journalists and epitomized by Nellie Bly’s frantic rush to beat Jules Verne’s record “eighty days” around the world. Lewis’s and Duncan’s “stunt” was the unchaperoned trip itself, and one of their goals seems to have been to put into practice the theory of travel writing articulated by Duncan in an 1887 article entitled “Outworn Literary Methods.” “Vastly changed,” this article claims, “is the literature of travel. The spirit of modern art has entered into it, and we get broad effects, strong lights, massed shadows in our foreign picture, and ready impressions from it.” “Vanished utterly” are sentimental and emotional effusions. Out of date also are elaborate word-pictures and meditations based upon Ruskin’s genius. “The traveller of to-day … writes graphically instead of the humanity about him, its tricks of speech, its manner of breaking bread, its ideals, aims, superstitions” (9 June 1887).17 A look at Lewis’s READING LILY LEWIS A Biocritical Study

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and Duncan’s accounts of the tour together suggests that, at least at first, the young women were engaged in a collaborative experiment based to some extent on Duncan’s ideas about a new form of travel writing that combines impressionistic description with a parody of older forms. Duncan’s “broad effects, strong lights, and massed shadows” – descriptions often composed of tiny points of light – become especially apparent in both Garth Grafton’s and Louis Lloyd’s accounts of Japan, but “ready impressions” and “graphic” descriptions of “the humanity about [one]” are clearly evident in both travellers’ accounts from “the Cipiar.”18 Lloyd’s and Grafton’s depictions of their fellow passengers and the settlers they meet often contribute, by virtue of their attention to detail, to commonly held stereotypes: “grumbling, scolding, squalling” East Londoners, “solid, bovine, patient, hard-working” Germans (“Louis Lloyd’s Letters” 11 Oct. 1888), crude prairie hoteliers, and idealized Northwest Mounted Policemen and farmers from Ontario. The travellers’ attempts to write dialects, a tendency also common in Canadian novel-writing at the time and aimed, of course, at conveying “tricks of speech,” sound xenophobic to a modern ear. Lloyd quotes an East Londoner who “ain’t goin’ to be put with them furriners” (“Louis Lloyd’s Letters” 18 Oct. 1888), for example, and Grafton a French railway worker near North Bay: “Me I work on the road. Sof’job” (“Winnipeg Whisperings” 6 Oct. 1888), and their depictions of Oriental speech later in the trip become much more denigrating. Both writers elegize Indians with exaggeratedly picturesque descriptions, then undermine these pictures with less romantic and often consequently demeaning images. For example, Grafton writes,

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[W]e wander to the outskirts of Moosimin. A single Indian, wearing his blanket as an Italian officer might his cloak, walks before us, tall and dignified, looking this way and that for something, a friend, perhaps, or his pony. When we turn he is still standing solitary against the burning sunset, looking across the land of his disinheritance. (“The Men of Moosomin” 20 Oct. 1888)

Later, writing about a tour of the Northwest Mounted Police Barracks in Regina, Grafton includes a description of an old drunken Indian lying in a lumpy heap “like one dead” in a police cell (“Regina and Its People” 27 Oct. 1888). Lloyd describes “a troop of Indians” seen from the train: “standing there like cattle, dark, strange, picturesque in the red sun-light,” then goes on to note that “[t]hey looked at us with an amused, not to say sarcastic air” that was “peculiarly irritating” (“Louis Lloyd’s Letters” 11 Oct. 1888). As she concludes the same account, Lloyd notes that one of their hosts in Winnipeg “has some buffalo too, asthmatic things that look at you from their prison with the sad, fierce, mysterious resignation of the Indian,” conveying and undermining in this one sentence the romantic nostalgia apparent in Grafton’s picturesque description and characteristic of Canadian views about Indians at the time.19 Both travellers respond ambivalently to Louis Riel. Grafton refers poetically to Riel as “the patriot and the traitor, the man and the mercenary, the murderer and the martyr” (“Regina and Its People” 27 Oct. 1888), and describes the window outside of which he was hanged in 1885 for his role in the North West Rebellion. Lloyd describes his burial place in St. Boniface: “the wooden cross READING LILY LEWIS A Biocritical Study

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that stands with flowers at its foot and a wooden fence around,” remarking that, “for the moment, the pretty, melancholy spot quite fails to remind us that beyond, beyond on the Hudson Flats across the bridge, Scott was murdered” (“Louis Lloyd’s Letters” 11 Oct. 1888).20 This ambivalence can perhaps be attributed to the influence of Nicholas Flood Davin, Member of Parliament for Assiniboia West and Editor of the Regina Leader, whom Lloyd introduces as their “genial host” in Regina. Davin’s most celebrated episode was his personal interview with Louis Riel on the eve of Riel’s execution, after gaining entry to the prison disguised as a priest.21 Both Lewis and Duncan echo Davin’s firm conviction that Riel was rightfully hanged and at the same time appear to share his profound sympathy for the man himself. Louis Lloyd’s accounts contain a few narratives of episodes that she, alone, describes, one of which involves Davin’s hospitality in Regina. “[W]e were perhaps more grateful to Mr. Davin,” she writes, “for introducing us to ‘Elaine,’” whose real name she was “not yet at liberty to disclose.” “[W]hen we accepted her hospitable invitation to dine in the evening, [w]e found a literary lady, but I hardly knew which I enjoyed most, her coffee or her conversation” (“Louis Lloyd’s Letters” 25 Oct. 1888). The “literary lady” would no doubt have been Kate Simpson Hayes, one of western Canada’s first successful women journalists. She and Davin never married but lived together for several years, had two children, and worked together for his newspaper. Hayes later became famous as “Mary Markwell” of the Winnipeg Free Press and was prominent among the organizers of the Canadian Women’s Press Club.22 In choosing to have Louis Lloyd mark this meeting with a sister newspaperwoman and “literary lady,” Lily 64

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Lewis perhaps reveals her own desire for a community of colleagues that, had she returned to Canada, she would most likely have found in the Women’s Press Club. Lewis’s absence from the membership of this club has, in fact, contributed significantly to her erasure from Canadian women’s history. Both Lloyd and Grafton describe a chance encounter, “just after leaving Medicine Hat,” with a famous American writer. Charles Dudley Warner, well known for his familiar essays and his personal travelogues and sketches as well as for his role as editor of several prominent American periodicals, claims, in Studies in the South and West with Comments on Canada, to have made a journey on the new Canadian railway line from Montreal in order to understand this country more fully. He includes in the volume a description of “a Canadian type,” discerning in this “type” “a distinctness which is neither English nor American … [and which] is noticeable especially in the women” (453): The Canadian Girl resembles the American in escape from a purely conventional restraint and in self-reliance, and she has, like the English, a well-modulated voice and distinct articulation. In the cities, also, she has taste in dress and a certain style which we think belongs to the New World. In features and action a certain modification has gone on, due partly to climate and partly to greater social independence. (453)

Lewis’s account of the meeting, Marian Fowler suggests, “reveals how Lily habitually stayed in the background” (Redney 153). Fowler credits Duncan with convincing her idol that “there is [after all] a Canadian type of woman” (Warner READING LILY LEWIS A Biocritical Study

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454) and with providing Warner with a model of this type. I would argue that Louis Lloyd’s sketch of the meeting presents a Lily not at all content to remain in the background, a Lily Lewis who, by means of skilful, self-deprecating humour, manages to remove herself from the sidelines of this conversation and place herself squarely in the centre of it by the end of the account, a Lily Lewis who, along with Duncan, and every bit as much as Duncan, constitutes Warner’s “Canadian Girl.”23 Lloyd begins her account with the admission that she has never heard of Warner, and continues to portray herself as “an unsophisticated young journalist … long[ing] with a prodigious longing to be noticed in high places” as she writes of being “distance[d],” of “[finding her]self out of the discussion,” when Garth, “having been some years on American newspapers,” started talking about Commercial Union24 (“Louis Lloyd’s Letter” 14 Dec. 1888). Somewhat later, an Englishman (real or imagined) “turned up,” Lloyd writes, and she claims that she and he discussed Robert Elsmere25 and Matthew Arnold and Goldwin Smith.26 It is difficult to determine how much of this account illustrates conventional patterns of journalistic writing that tend to obscure the individual voice, and how much reveals a young woman who genuinely wants to assert that she, too, knows about literature, philosophy, and trans-national cultural issues. Later in the same account, Lloyd writes of how they met Mr. Warner again in Vancouver and travelled to Victoria as guests on his yacht, and how as he said “good-bye” to her, he offered her some advice about writing that she will “always remember and try to follow out.” Here again, much as in the case of the “literary lady” in Regina, the voice of Lily Lewis, the twenty-twoyear-old woman enthralled by the charismatic 66

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older writer and appreciative of his attention that this time pointedly includes her, blends with that of Louis Lloyd, the “journalist” persona encountering a mentor. Mr. Warner’s parting remarks seem to have been offered to Lewis, his new young friend, as well as to Lloyd, the “aspiring writer” persona. Both Lloyd and Grafton mention their meeting with three charming French gentlemen at the Hotel Vancouver, but only Louis Lloyd relates (or perhaps imagines) the story about accompanying these gentlemen on a “duly chaperoned” overnight hunting trip up the Fraser River. In this sketch Lloyd alludes frequently to L.L.’s international milieu and at the same time echoes a theme popular in Canadian fiction at the time: old world culture meeting new world vigour. Dressed “à la militaire,” and described unspecifically and picturesquely as having “delicate features,” “golden” features, and “charming” features, these “birds” (she calls them Monsieurs “Hirondelle,” “Moineau,” and “Pinson”) “s[a]ng Massinet [sic],” quoted de Musset, talked about “simplicity in art,” and shot at anything that moved. Playing with an opposition currently fashionable in European popular culture that pictures an effete and feminized France set against a masculine, militarized Prussia, Lloyd writes of dreaming that night about being “in a battle between the French and the Prussians.” The Prussians (she was one of the Prussians) “had web feet and their brass helmets were slipping down over their beaks” (“Louis Lloyd’s Letter” 28 Dec. 1888). In this deceptively simple sketch, Lewis perhaps lightly interrogates Canada’s emerging popular consciousness of itself as a rugged, masculine culture, while at the same time asserting a self-conscious literariness that aims to achieve READING LILY LEWIS A Biocritical Study

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“simplicity in art” based upon a combination of Old World and New World experience.

J apanese S ketches No doubt due in part to her friend’s influence and in part simply to maturation as well as to the effects of the earlier part of the journey, Lily Lewis seems to have arrived in Japan in a mood much like Duncan’s as Marian Fowler imagines it: “relaxed and floating, open to new experiences, ready for anything” (Redney 158). More spontaneous, more open to genuine laughter and personal revelation than the L.L. who wrote rather conventionally of Italy, Louis Lloyd’s style now reveals a writer who has selected and organized her material with an eye to its artistic and aesthetic integrity as well as its intellectual content. Lewis discusses Japanese women as Lloyd focuses on two contrasting individuals, her “little maid,” Tomi, ever eager to please and even more eager to learn English (22 Feb. 1889), and a “little geisha,” O Mitsu San, representative of the disappearing “Old Japan” (21 June 1889). Lewis expresses her opinions about the western influence on Japan as Lloyd relates the story of her friendship with O Taro San, “a typical modern Japanese gentleman” (7 June 1889). Lewis comments about art and religion and marriage as Louis Lloyd describes a ladies’ art school (15 Mar. 1889), a Buddhist shrine (5 July 1889), and a visit to Nagasaki (9 Aug. 1889), and over her composite picture of Japan she casts an aura of elegiac nostalgia reminiscent of L.L.’s feelings about the Boboli Gardens of Florence and Louis Lloyd’s about the Indians of the Canadian prairies and characteristic of prevalent attitudes about Japan at the time. In both of his entries describing Lily 68

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Lewis Rood, Henry Morgan includes the “Little Book of Japanese sketches” that Mrs. Rood “was about to publish” in 1898, indicating the status, in Lily Lewis Rood’s own consciousness, of this group of sketches as a separate, integral, and specially regarded work of literary art. The Japanese sketches have distinct titles – “Arrival in Tokyo,” “By Lantern Light,” “Sayonara” – further underlining their importance. Both Lloyd and Grafton mention two gentlemen, “Mr. Henry Norman” and “The Compleat Angler,” among the passengers on the liner to Japan and again on the “P&O” to Ceylon. Henry Norman, a fellow journalist, was travelling in the East at the same time as Lewis and Duncan, and he did many of the things Lewis and Duncan did, such as renting a Japanese house and living in it Japanese-style, and his accounts of his travels, appearing in the Montreal Star, the Pall Mall Gazette, and several American periodicals, presented precise and voluminous factual details about the places he visited. “The Compleat Angler” (a name borrowed from a 1653 text by Izaac Walton that talks about life in terms of fishing) 27 “had a place on the Restigouche where he fished for salmon” (Grafton, “Over the Pacific Ocean” 22 Dec. 1888), and is in this case the stereotypical American traveller who complains about everything and cannot adapt to foreign climates and will not tolerate foreign ways. Lloyd describes him as suffering volubly from the heat and “looking under his monster green-lined topee, and in his garment of pongee, very like something hot and fluffy, and unhappy under a mushroom” (“Looking Back” 28 Mar. 1890). Together, these gentlemen serve as foils to Lloyd and Grafton and the alternative kind of travel writing they prefer to practice. They will enjoy themselves, not contemplate READING LILY LEWIS A Biocritical Study

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things too much, forgo facts, and instead simply convey their impressions to their readers. Here even more than in the Canadian sketches, Lewis’s writing shows Duncan’s influence. Grafton describes a cloisonné piece on its way to the French Exposition: “a ball-shaped vase” with a polish “so perfect it seems to gleam through from the inside.… All tints imaginable contribute to its colour harmony, yet it leaves in the main a soft rich brown impression” (“Shopping in Japan” 16 Mar. 1889). In language that echoes and condenses Ruskin’s famous description of St. Mark’s in Venice,28 this image succinctly encapsulates Duncan’s theory of impressionistic writing: acknowledging her debt to Ruskin, she will continue in the more modern footsteps of writers like W. D. Howells and Henry James. In many of their Japanese sketches, both Garth Grafton and Louis Lloyd connect travel writing and painting precisely as Henry James does in his famous portrait of Venice.29 Grafton describes the colour of a December morning as “dainty and cool, in clean, delicate washes of grays and blues, as it might have come from the brush of a water-colorist with a firm hand for detail” (“The Bones of Jyeasu” 21 Mar. 1889). Lloyd writes of the “bare country” around a teahouse as “a delicate sketch waiting for the paint brush of spring” (“By Lantern Light” 21 June 1889). In Grafton’s “good-bye” to Japan, a budding red camellia she carries slowly becomes covered with silently falling snow, and as her language simultaneously moves from prose to poetry, the piece affirms the value of art (“A Japanese Snowstorm” 27 Apr. 1889). Lloyd writes of being taken, “one mild evening, … out into the witchery of moonlight of Tokyo streets,” of riding among the “eccentric shadows of an avenue of leafless cherry trees” to meet and be entertained 70

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by a “little geisha” and to experience her exquisite artistry (“By Lantern Light” 21 June 1889). Duncan’s narrator in A Social Departure describes Tokyo at nightfall with an emphasis on points of light and a reference to a tea-tray: [W]e rode away out through the gate into the life and light and colour of Tokyo’s early evening. In my picture of it, … the great daintily-tinted paper globes were pulsing and glowing before the multitudinous little shops; the gay drops of light that hung from the jinrikshas were frisking up hill and down; there was still a red memory of the sun in the sky behind the dragon-like arms of the gnarled pine trees that guard the Mikado’s moat; and against these three wild geese were flying, black and swift, long necks outstretched in front, short legs outstretched behind, just as they flew always across a tea-tray, that I knew long before I went to Japan. (A Social Departure 104)

Louis Lloyd’s literary impressions similarly focus on points of light and “massed shadows,” and often similarly refer to prior images. Tokyo, she finds “intoxicating,” “fantastic, vapoury, and exquisitely lovely,” surpassing all expectations: Lanterns bobbed and trembled and danced everywhere. Over the balconies of the teahouses they hung like berries, over the door of a little private habitation one would float like a bubble; in the dark moats their reflections swam like goldfish, and at the end of a delicate bamboorod, men either carried or fixed to their carts, they wriggled like gold-fish caught. We shot along wide streets where the crowds tottered vaguely about in the mist-tempered moonlight; READING LILY LEWIS A Biocritical Study

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we plunged into mysterious alleys where the few lanterns we found seemed to have lost themselves; we flitted under the shadow of huge stone gateways; we glided past black, threatening moats, and then, with one final rush, our little carriages suddenly came to a standstill. (“Louis Lloyd’s Letter” 25 Jan. 1889)

She writes of how she had been prepared for Japan before arriving there by Pierre Loti’s story of his “little marriage” to Madame Chrysanthème: “[H]is book [is] first of all a picture … delicate and minute as Japanese bronze work” (“Sayonara” 9 Aug. 1889). “They had told us,” she says, “of a land of paper houses and of toy gardens, where the fascinating beauties of the tea-chest walked the streets,” and she concludes her initial impression of Japan with the comment, “it all seemed as mad a medley of beauty and grotesqueness as ever artist imagined for a Satsuma vase” (“Louis Lloyd’s Letter” 18 Jan. 1889). It is but a short distance from “toy gardens” and “funny little mountain[s]” (Grafton, “The Bones of Jyeasu” 21 Mar. 1889) to funny little people who become the objects of much hilarity. A review of Duncan’s A Social Departure, published in London’s Pall Mall Gazette 11 July 1890 and entitled “How Two Young Ladies Went Round the World,” includes a lengthy excerpt from the book describing an interview with a Japanese reporter. The reviewer writes, “We defy anyone not to giggle a score of times, or not to laugh outright on occasion, if not at the Japanese reporter, then at the Japanese railway officials or household,” illustrating the extent to which this kind of humour satisfied the tastes of the time. Thomas Tausky remarks that “[t]he two visitors manage to laugh in Japanese faces a distressing number of times” 72

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(Sara Jeannette Duncan: Novelist of Empire 58), although he sees their “enthusiasm for Japanese ways” (58) as more significant. Lewis and Duncan do seem at this stage of their journey not only to be especially sensitive to aesthetic impressions but also to be always ready to laugh uproariously, at ridiculous situations and at themselves as well as occasionally at the people they meet. Both writers make much of the reporter’s difficulty with English as he wonders how old “radies” are and inquires about the nature of Canadian “porryticks” (A Social Departure 59), but, as this bit of dialogue reveals, Louis Lloyd also expresses some sympathy for the reporter’s plight: “‘You – you must think foreigners – very rude,’ I stuttered. ‘Yes,’ was the somewhat unexpected reply” (“Louis Lloyd’s Letter” 18 Jan. 1889).30 The “greater sympathy and warmth for a person of a different culture” (Tausky 62) that Tausky attributes to Lily Lewis is indeed evident in Lloyd’s description of her Japanese friends, wherein she expresses (albeit with a certain condescension apparent in the way that the adjective “little” prefaces almost every Japanese individual discussed) a genuine joy in the company of Tomi, Taro San, and O Mitsu San and reveals an ability to suspend western judgement in her delight in Loti’s “Chrysanthéme.” Duncan, on the other hand, tends to emphasize difference and distance, especially with regard to religion, as is apparent in her portrait of a “pale weird woman” performing strange rituals in a little temple they visited near Nikko, Japan. “And when that pale weird woman … cast one level look upon us,” she writes, “we felt that no sum of years or of miles or of human difference could avail to express the shivering distance between her and us” (Grafton, “The Bones of Jyeasu” 21 Mar. 1889). Where Grafton READING LILY LEWIS A Biocritical Study

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notes the utterly incomprehensible strangeness of foreign religious practices, Lloyd comments upon the rightness of Buddhism, with its emphasis on pleasure, for the pleasure-loving, present-focussed Japanese people (“Concerning Religion in Japan” 5 July 1889). Later, in Calcutta, Grafton concludes a vignette with the image of an Afghan kneeling in prayer, and says, “We did not think it wonderful that he prayed” (“More about Ceylon” 20 July 1889). Louis Lloyd also describes Mohammedans in Calcutta: “in solemn lines, praying as I thought men had forgotten to pray,” and she writes of coming upon a solitary worshipper “oblivious to everything” with “a light in his dark, faithful, passionate eyes [that] seems almost sacred” (“A Sunday in Calcutta” 14 Feb. 1890). The Lily Lewis who emerges from the pages of Louis Lloyd’s Japanese sketches bears little resemblance to her fictional counterpart, Orthodocia Love of Whittingdon, Devonshire, the companion of Duncan’s narrator (“SJD”) in A Social Departure. The “Louis Lloyd” of Garth Grafton’s (and later Sara Jeannette Duncan’s) “Special Correspondence,” however, bears more and more resemblance to Orthodocia Love as the journey progresses. Earlier in the trip, when she writes of Winnipeg, for example, Grafton presents visual impressions of the river forks and an avenue of stately homes, and praises the hospitality of their “bachelor” hosts, whereas the narrator of Duncan’s novel focuses instead on Orthodocia’s surprise at finding things so civilized. Now, both Louis and Orthodocia leave Japan encumbered with nineteen teapots. Many of Grafton’s later accounts are almost identical, except for the names, to the corresponding chapters in the novel. In the novel, Duncan further develops her experiment with a new kind of travel literature that will 74

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combine fine impressionist description with humorous satire of conventional types of travel writing. The novel was initially published in serial form, with illustrations by F. H. Townsend, in a British periodical, The Women’s Pictorial. At the suggestion of the magazine’s editor, she “excised” (Heaps 89) Louis Lloyd and created instead a British companion, a rather conservative and often laughable foil to the more adventurous and more sensible narrator, “SJD.” Orthodocia becomes precisely the kind of traveller, the recorder of facts and figures, that both Garth Grafton and Louis Lloyd had made a point of not being. When not behaving ridiculously or falling in love (the novel also becomes a romance in its later stages, when a cousin who first appears on the Canadian prairies shows up and proposes to Orthodocia at the Taj Mahal), Orthodocia is continually writing down facts in her notebook. A shift in this direction, in fact, subtly occurs long before the novel, and Orthodocia, materialize. Louis Lloyd, in Grafton’s accounts, begins more and more often to write down facts in her notebook.31 The novel obscures the record, visible in the two newspaper accounts of the earlier portion of the journey, and in all of Louis Lloyd’s accounts, of genuine friendship and laughter shared by two active participants in an innovative, collaborative writing experiment. Louis Lloyd’s accounts of the journey stop appearing in The Week at just about the same time as Grafton’s Louis begins to behave like Duncan’s Orthodocia. It is impossible to know whether Lewis stopped submitting articles to The Week during the later part of the trip or whether The Week simply stopped publishing them, but at precisely the time Lloyd’s articles stop appearing, Duncan begins to sign her articles for the Star READING LILY LEWIS A Biocritical Study

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“Sara Jeannette Duncan” rather than “Garth Grafton.” Lloyd’s final remarks upon leaving Japan: “The music and the laughter have died away, and the lights have gone out, and now it is gray morning” (“Sayonara” 9 Aug. 1889), can be read in several ways. Like the tendency to compare presently experienced scenes to earlier ones encountered in Japanese artifacts and the nostalgia about the inevitable loss of old Japanese ways, this comment participates in travel-writing rhetoric common at the time. Travellers loved Japan, romanticized both its scenery and its customs, and expressed profound regret at saying good-bye. In Lewis’s case, her observation seems also to have been prophetic: as Lloyd’s joy fades, and the colour fades from her picture, Lewis herself begins to fade from the picture in which she has tried so hard to include herself.

A fter J apan Louis Lloyd’s columns describing places the young women visited after leaving Japan echo the portrait that composes itself in Lloyd’s Japanese sketches of a relaxed and joyous and then a sad and despondent Lily Lewis. Lloyd declares, by means of a conversation with a crow on her windowsill, that she is in Colombo to learn not about “legislation,” but about “where the loveliest loiterers were to be found” (“An Incident by the Sea” 27 Dec. 1889), and her pleasure in this place becomes the tone that pervades her sketch of Colombo. Then she describes a sad Calcutta where “there is no awakening to new life” in the early morning. “Melancholy” oxen jog along with “a resigned conviction in their eyes,” while the city, full of 76

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“half-clad, sad-faced, hustling men,” “smiles sadly in the morning light like some one remembering a sorrow” (“A Sunday in Calcutta” 14 Feb. 1890). The final column, “Looking Back,” is out of place chronologically. Appearing four months after the Colombo piece, it describes the voyage from Japan to Ceylon. Lloyd’s impressions of Hong Kong reiterate stereotypes generated by tourism. She finds the city’s “China town” saturated with “a sickly perfume of Joss-sticks” and cluttered with “shops where they sell all sorts of evil-looking food [and] shops where they sell the vulgar Chinese art.” “Time in the east,” she concludes, echoing her farewell to Japan, “is a passing from a darkened room into a light one, and back again into a darkened one” (“Looking Back” 28 Mar. 1890). In their accounts of Colombo, both Grafton and Lloyd present artistic narratives depicting the lotus as the Ceylonese counterpart of the Japanese chrysanthemum. Garth Grafton writes of passing, at the end of a tour of Colombo, by A wonderful place – a great shining green-brown lake in the midst of the town with grassy banks and mangoes and palms and tulip trees reflected in it, half covered with the broad green leaves and the marvelous blossoms of the lotus. It was afternoon and the shadows were long and grateful, and the native groups all red and white and yellow that clustered together and fell apart in them were full of slow indolence.

Grafton tells of beckoning to one of the natives and offering him money. His “heathen mind assimilated [her] sinful idea instantly, and he went in up to his neck: We had a lotus apiece and were off,” she goes on, and concludes her vignette with a Jamesian description in opals and pale greens: READING LILY LEWIS A Biocritical Study

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“[We] walked back along the curving pink shore which is the loveliest in the world. The opal sea, light and delicate in all its lines, sent in a single long sweeping wave to break upon the sand.… The sky was a strange pale green” (“More About Ceylon” 20 July 1889). Lloyd tells a different story. “I was sitting in our room in the Galle Face Hotel,” she writes, “pondering” over “a pamphlet of statistics.” Suddenly Garth came in on tiptoe and put something between the pages of the pamphlet of statistics. It was a flower. It was a very large flower, with a multitude of velvety rounded petals, pearly pink, like the lining of a shell. I took it up in my hands. I looked into it as one looks in the face of a living thing. Its perfume was fine and strong. I bent lower over it with a sort of rapture. I put my lips close, close to its warm soft leaves. Then I felt my brain go giddy. It was the heart of India that I held. Between me and the pamphlet of statistics Garth had put a lotus.” (“An Incident by the Sea” 27 Dec. 1889)

With this multi-sensual poetic impression Louis Lloyd includes herself in a journalistic conversation in which Garth Grafton and “Mr. Henry Norman,” the collector of statistics, have been engaging in the Star, asserting that she, too, will focus on beauty and art in her writing. Duncan’s account, probably inadvertently, undermines an unsophisticated slip into cliché on Lewis’s part. Louis Lloyd’s “An Incident By the Sea” includes a trip, one evening after sunset, into the Petta, the native quarter of Colombo, to purchase “native material” for a dress. On the way back, as her jinrikisha was passing a big pond of lotuses on the outskirts of the native town, Lloyd 78

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writes, a native who had been lurking around the shop she had visited “started up” from the bushes and began pushing from behind, his “hot breath” close on her neck. A “British Theseus in white ducks” “arose” from a bicycle in time to rescue her from the “horrid” possibilities associated with the “two dark faces in the still, pale starlight.” It had begun to be fashionable for sophisticated women travel writers to eschew this typical Victorian narrative about encountering potentially threatening native men, and Duncan’s alternate story about the native going into the pond to fetch the lotuses underlines her more enlightened stance. A similar moment occurs earlier, during the Canadian portion of the journey. Louis Lloyd describes a “perfectly intoxicating” buggy ride across the open Canadian prairie, seeing in the “swirling clouds … whole cities outlined against the sky – towers and minarets in oriental profusion and delicate splendour” (“Louis Lloyd’s Letters” 18 Oct. 1888). Duncan treats the same image as a cliché: Garth and Louis stand on the platform at the back of the train and remember that they are supposed to see towers and minarets as they look at the mountains (A Social Departure 41).32 A certain loss of confidence begins to emerge in Lewis’s letters to her family. In the first of the two letters, headed “Kandy, Ceylon,” and dated “February 1st, 1889,” “Lillie” sends “a great deal” of love to her family and tells them of her delight in Ceylon, this “intoxicating” island paradise where “vegitation [sic] has gone mad.”33 She says she “revel[s] in the warm sweet-smelling air,” and notes that the “Galle Face Hotel” is the “sweetest” they have stopped at. “People can’t get over our travelling alone this way,” she says, “but it is a very jolly way, for despite a little tall language READING LILY LEWIS A Biocritical Study

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between us when something has disagreed with Garth, or my work has gone badly, we have lots of fun.” Then she recalls having seen things in a darker light the day before and comments about how people are so “taken” with Garth that they sometimes forget to notice her. She writes, too, of being “simply tortured by anxiety” about her work and the possibility that she might “accomplish nothing” “should it fail.” “I dreamed last night that not one of my letters had appeared in The Week,” she confesses. In the second letter, undated but headed “Chowringhes, Calcutta,” “Lillie” tells her family about some of the “many wonderful and nice things” that have been happening since her last letter.34 She writes of their having had articles printed in local newspapers. She describes having dinner at Government House, wearing “the loveliest frock [she] ever possessed,” being escorted to a table with silver plates “laid in a bed of dark red roses,” and dancing, “not badly,” in a new low-necked dress of pale pink Indian silk. And again in this letter she expresses a fondness for her family that makes the later rift hard to comprehend. Duncan’s romantic adventures at this point in the journey might also have contributed to Lewis’s failing confidence and possibly waning interest in the trip. Some of the things that Orthodocia experiences in A Social Departure actually happened to Duncan herself. At the dinner Lily describes in her letter from Calcutta, hosted by the Viceroy, Lord Lansdowne, formerly Governor General of Canada and an acquaintance of Duncan’s from her time as Parliamentary correspondent at the 7 Lily Lewis (right) and Sara Jeannette Duncan. Cairo, 1889. Courtesy of Herbert Lewis.

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Ottawa Post, Duncan met the man who would become her husband a year and a half later. Everard Cotes, an Englishman, had been working as an entomologist for the Indian Museum for several years. A whirlwind romance ensued, and some time later, when the young women had decided to travel by train to Agra to view the Taj Mahal, and then to wait and see this monument to romance for the first time by moonlight, Everard was there to surprise Sara (or “Redney” as she was called) with a proposal of marriage. All of Duncan’s biographers have commented on her winning personality, the charm that gained her the attention of such people as Joseph Pulitzer, Charles Dudley Warner, and Lord Lansdowne, and that can be discerned in her letter to Lansing Lewis. Here, even more than in the earlier encounter with Warner on the train, Lily Lewis must have felt “distanced” by her more flamboyant and seemingly more successful companion. One concrete item places the actual Lily Lewis back in the picture of the later portion of the journey. A photograph taken at a studio in Cairo, Egypt (Illustration 7), located among the Lewis papers, shows the two young women posed together under an umbrella.

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A Summer in Paris An undated photograph taken in Paris (Illustration 8), with a note on the back saying “these had to be taken” for a press pass, reveals a Lily Lewis who looks much like the one in the Cairo photo, and might well have been taken in the early summer of 1889, when Lewis began to submit articles from Paris to both the Montreal Star and The Week. Seven articles by Louis Lloyd in the Star between June and September 1889 describe the Paris Exposition and other cultural events of the summer. In an earlier “Montreal Letter” sketch describing artist William Brymner’s studio in Montreal, Lloyd talked about the influences she saw in his work of his training at Julian’s atelier in Paris, and in her Montreal Star column of 15 June 1889, Lloyd writes about a number of other Canadian artists currently working in Paris, the best-known of whom is Paul Peel. Here, as in the earlier work, she writes knowledgeably about painting, and she decries the lack of support Canadians give to their own artists. Lewis was one of the first Canadian journalists to write about the French art schools, but soon after this, The Week frequently featured articles about them.35 Two articles by Louis Lloyd entitled “Parisian Topics” and focusing on art and music at the Exposition appear in The Week in September 1889 (several months before the final columns describing the world tour). As Lloyd writes in her first submission to the Star of going again to see Madame and the pension, and finding that both have grown much more pretentious, we see the first of many subtle references to her earlier work that appear in Lewis’s later writing, the first evidence of what seems to be a desire on READING LILY LEWIS A Biocritical Study

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Lewis’s part to regain the visibility as a writer that she once enjoyed. Descriptive techniques developed in the Japanese sketches continue to be apparent in these later ones. Images from the Japanese sketches recur in a slightly altered form. Tiny points of light figure prominently in Louis Lloyd’s impression of the “gorgeous illumination” that marked the opening of the Exposition just as they do Grafton’s and her impressions of Japanese scenes. “As it grew darker,” Lloyd writes, “every dome and palace was picked out in light against the night.” Over the water of the Seine “fell the electric light from the Tour Effel” [sic], erected for this occasion, and, precisely echoing an earlier description of Tokyo by moonlight, “red lanterns hung like huge red berries” from the trees on the banks (“In Holiday Attire” 8 June 1889).

8 Lily Lewis. Paris, undated. Courtesy of Herbert Lewis.

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Parisian Personalities Other than the newspaper clipping announcing her marriage to Roland Rood in April 1891 and the photograph of Lily in a jaunty hat, taken in Italy and dated 1892 (Illustration 9), the material in the Lewis papers reveals nothing about Lily Lewis’s personal life at this time. The sketches I located in London’s Pall Mall Gazette, together with Henry Morgan’s list of the publications for which she wrote, suggest that she chose to remain in Paris and work as a freelance journalist, adopting an international persona while retaining her Canadian pen name Louis Lloyd. As in 1886 when L.L. began writing about Parisian culture for Canadian readers, Lewis’s work again enters an established milieu in the British newspapers. Just prior to the appearance of Lloyd’s sketches, the Pall Mall Gazette had run three consecutive series: “Celebrities and Their Portraits,” “Private Views in the Artists’ Studios,” and “Artists at Home.” All include several articles in which “a representative” presents a portrait of a member of the Royal Society of London based upon a personal interview with the celebrity. In her sketch, “The Artist Fin de Siècle: M. Van Beer’s Atelier,” Louis Lloyd describes “atelier eccentricities” that rival only the “Eastern Fantasy” that Benjamin Constant “has imagined for himself” (19 Sept. 1890), and includes some hand-drawn sketches along with her text. On 19 November 1890 Lloyd writes at length about the Princess Gortschakoff and her sumptuous entertainments. 9 Lily Lewis Rood, Italy, 1892. Courtesy of Herbert Lewis.

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Lloyd’s sketch about the Princess Gortschakoff confirms Lewis’s acquaintance with the “daughter-in-law of the Russian Chancellor,” with whom Henry Morgan reports that she travelled to Egypt, going up the Nile as far as Dongola, “where no white woman had ever been before,” and subsequently publishing an account of the expedition “in a French review.” Edmund Swinglehurst writes about the popularity of this particular adventure, about how in the 1880s and ’90s “everybody who wanted to be thought a bone fide traveller went to Egypt and the Nile and most of them travelled on a Cook’s tour” (Swinglehurst 97). Everyone in the Russian court, he says, “from the czar downwards” (97) travelled up the Nile on the set of “Ramses” vessels designed by Cook’s for greater or lesser degrees of adventure and excitement at various stages up the river.36 Lewis and the Princess would probably have travelled on one of these boats, but an extensive search of French reviews has yielded no trace of Lewis’s purported account. I think she might have published this piece in Galignani’s Messenger, a popular English language periodical published in Paris and one of the publications for which, according to Morgan, Lewis wrote. I have been told that no copies of this periodical dated in the 1890s exist today.

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Lily Lewis Rood Lily Lewis Rood’s 1895 monograph about French artist Pierre Puvis de Chavannes represents the culmination of Lewis’s career-long interest in art and artists. Louis Lloyd’s subheading for one of the Pall Mall Gazette sketches, “The Artist fin de siècle,” identifies their author with the avantgarde attitudes with which the phrase is associated.37 The Paris art community, with its ateliers, its art and music students, and its journalists and novelists, is, in fact, at the very centre of the notion of fin de siècle, and it is also at the centre of many of the novels about the New Woman published in the 1890s. Lily Lewis’s choice to write about this community, together with her marriage to an American artist of whom her family did not entirely approve, whom we might assume was studying and/or working in the Paris art community when she met him (Roland Rood, in fact, exhibited an oil painting, a portrait of a woman entitled “Jeresa,” in a Paris Salon in 1894), 38 and the problems involving money that emerge in letters among the Lewis papers, all suggest that Lewis might have been immersed at this time in the kind of bohemian Parisian life frequently READING LILY LEWIS A Biocritical Study

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depicted in these novels. And it is here in the Paris art community that Lily Lewis’s and Sara Jeannette Duncan’s writing intersects again in the mid-1890s. In 1894, the year before the publication of Lewis’s book, Duncan’s novel about a New Woman, A Daughter of Today, was published. Duncan had been living in India since her marriage and had already had several novels published in England and the United States, all of which resemble A Social Departure in their blending of social comedy and travel narrative. This one ventures into more serious territory as it tells the story of the radically emancipated Elfrida Bell, an American artist and writer whose extremity results in tragedy. Elfrida bears many startling similarities to the actual Lily Lewis, and her portrayal inadvertently disparages the life and work of the woman she resembles. Elfrida Bell does many of the things that Lewis actually did, but in the novel they are trivialized. Elfida sends “Paris Letters” to American newspapers. She plans a series of articles that she will call “ ‘Through the Studios’ or something of that sort.” It will be “about the artists over here, and their ways of working, and their places and their ideas and all that” (A Daughter of Today 92), the narratorial implication being that she writes about artists and “popular spectacles” (163) because she is unable to write “real” literature, i.e., novels. She wants to write for Raffini’s Chronicle (corresponding, perhaps to Galignani’s Messenger, the Parisian publication for which Lewis wrote), and she receives an invitation from a Russian aristocrat, a “Princess Bobaloff,” to attend a lavish entertainment at her home. She reads Ruskin’s Stones of Venice. Bits of French intersperse with English in her speech and her letters as they also 90

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do in Lewis’s letters to her family. Elfrida calls herself “a female Zola” (101). (Lewis wrote positively about the French naturalist in several of her sketches, and in her monograph of de Chavannes mentions a personal acquaintance with him.) In her writing, Elfrida will describe “old coats, … litter and dust” (93) as the naturalist writers do (and as Louis Lloyd self-consciously does in her sketch of the hunting trip in British Columbia: the hut in which the group spends the night is littered with “greasy papers” [“Louis Lloyd’s Letter” 28 Dec. 1888]). Echoing L.L.’s moment with Franz Liszt, Elfrida “[strikes] a false note” (142) socially when she kisses the hand of a visiting celebrity in an excessive burst of public enthusiasm. “[A]rt spoke to her from all sides” (14), the narrator says, and mentions again and again the “little flame within [her]” (126) that Elfrida so enjoys talking about. Walter Pater’s doctrine of aestheticism becomes sheer egotism in Elfrida’s total devotion to creating herself as a work of art. Elfrida refuses feminine desire, choosing instead the motto “Pas femme – artiste” (281) to define herself, and for this the book’s narrator also condemns her. Elfrida commits suicide while the more conventional female character in the novel finds romance and happiness. Characters like Elfrida, many critics have suggested, especially those created by Canadian novelists, tend either to be “disciplined” in the novel (usually in this case they learn how to behave as feminists without exceeding the bounds of propriety) or to be destroyed by their author.39 Elfrida’s “Bohemian irregularity” (Gerson, “Wild Colonial Girls” 63) would be simply unimaginable in a Canadian character, and as a writer concerned with maintaining a Canadian readership, Duncan had no choice but to condemn her. As so READING LILY LEWIS A Biocritical Study

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often happened in the case of “real” New Women of the fin de siècle, an actual New Woman’s story becomes obscured as it gets submerged in its fictional counterpart. In her Introduction to the 1888 Tecumseh Press edition of A Daughter of Today, Misao Dean examines the ways in which Duncan’s novel participates in current discussions about the artistic movement known as “decadence,” as well as about the New Woman in general. Decadence was characterized by a fin de siècle abandonment of Victorian traditions and an extreme individualism originating in Walter Pater’s aestheticism, his notion of “the individual life [becoming a] work of art, burning with a ‘hard, gem-like flame,’ ” as articulated in his “Conclusion” to The Renaissance (Dean x). Elfrida’s egotism, her outrageousness, her stated preference for the Decadent poets Swinburne and Rossetti, clearly denote her connections to the movement, as does her fascination with all things French, including Zola.40 The actual details of Lily Lewis’s life get thoroughly mixed up in the novel with clichés typical of Punch cartoon critiques of aestheticism and decadence. At the same time, these details enrich Duncan’s treatment of current issues, much as Dean suggests that Elfrida, while unable to achieve artistic success herself, becomes a catalyst that enlivens the work of the other characters, Janet and Kendall. Precise parallels break down in the links between Elfrida and Lily Lewis, however: a few of the things that Elfrida writes and does correspond directly to Duncan herself, thus offering scope for investigation of decentred subjectivity in the novel. Elfrida in some ways becomes an amalgam of Lewis and Duncan and a number

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of literary types, much as the narrator does in A Social Departure. From yet another point of view, Duncan’s use of details of Lewis’s life as material for her novel suggests some new interpretations of this novel in the context of pre-modernist novels of the New Woman. Ann Ardis suggests in New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism that a “decentred subjectivity”(4) makes these novels direct precursors to the modernist writing of the Nineteen Hundreds. In their frequent references to circumstances outside of the text, she says, they resist efforts to separate the literary from the historical and political. Read in conjunction with the real-life experiences that inform it, as Ardis claims novels of the New Woman should be read, the novel perhaps articulates the kinds of difficulties that might be encountered by a woman journalist adrift in an international fin de siècle world. Lily Lewis Rood presents herself more favourably in her sketch of Puvis de Chavannes. Her monograph represents a genre that was becoming increasingly popular in its time but has since been forgotten. Current studies of women writers at the fin de siècle often note a tendency among these writers to move away from huge, tripledecker novels like Mrs. Ward’s Robert Elsmere and to publish, instead, slim volumes of fiction in new forms or non-fictional material, often in the form of monographs or individual studies of character.41 Pierre Puvis de Chavannes was the focus of considerable international attention in the early 1890s, as the leader of the “New Salon,” a group of French and American painters who broke away from the original “Paris Salon” and exhibited their work at the Champs de Mars, and as the creator of the decorative borders that graced many READING LILY LEWIS A Biocritical Study

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of France’s new public buildings. While it appears regrettably sycophantic to a reader today, Lewis Rood’s twenty-nine page monograph nevertheless has none of the sensationalist voyeurism sometimes apparent in Louis Lloyd’s jaunts into the “darker haunts” of Montreal and less of the romantically effusive praise that characterizes Lewis Rood’s feature on Puvis de Chavannes in Modern Art.42 It has, at least occasionally, a straightforward stylishness that suggests an attempt at the kind of “simplicity in art” that Lewis had admired in the conversation of the French gentlemen in Canada and praised in the “exquisitely artistic” spray of red berries or branch of plum blossoms in traditional Japanese decoration, and that she describes as the “perfect simplicity” of de Chavannes’ work. We can see, embedded in the monograph’s description of the artist’s values and habits of work, the international influences that have characterized Lewis’s work from the very beginning. She writes of how de Chavannes is indifferent to Ruskin’s praise or censure (15) 43 yet professes and demonstrates a joy in his vocation that has helped to make his nation great. She relates how she, herself, “had the delightful privilege of bringing him all Zola’s enthusiasm” for his work, “as Zola had just expressed it to [her]” (15). She writes of the man’s tact and magnanimity, his charm and principle. She describes what he likes to wear and how he lights a pipe in private. The sketch includes the figure of the writer talking with the artist “in the gray atelier on Place Pigalle” (29), seeing him in “the merciless heat” of midsummer (29) and again in cooler times, and remembering “a rush, four years ago” (4) to a delicately dusty studio in Montmartre to interview de Chavannes for the first time. Lewis Rood thus again indirectly refers 94

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her readers back to an earlier time when she was publishing articles under her Canadian pen name Louis Lloyd. The two prose poems published in the New York Bookman in 1896 elliptically illustrate many of Lewis’s concerns and writing practices, and poignantly articulate the failure of this writer, and many others like her, to remain visible as public figures. In “The Face in the Mirror,” a third-person speaker presents an elliptical narrative about a woman who enters a house one foggy night and noiselessly creeps into a room in which a man and a woman are standing in front of a mirror. The man sees the speaker’s white face in the mirror, then she vanishes into the “shrouding fog” outside in the city streets, but the eyes remain reflected in the mirror. The gothic image invokes a macabre mood, and the notion of disappearance becomes infused with the dramatic intensity of a sexual triangle. The first-person speaker of “A Perfume” recalls being joined for a moment on a hot, dusty train by a woman whose features remain indistinct, and noticing a “dress of old-time flowered silk, patterned with little faded roses on brown with bars of black,” a bonnet that “might be of straw with velvet geraniums,” and “a sweet-smelling” wave of perfume. The train stops, and the woman disappears in the crowded station. The speaker follows the trace left by the perfume until it, too, “fade[s] into the city air [and is] lost” (322–23). The poetic language in “A Perfume” resonates strangely and interestingly with Louis Lloyd’s prose description of the lotus flower in her Ceylon vignette. The “velvety rounded” petals of the lotus blossom reappear in an altered form in the details of the dress and hat in the poem. Lloyd says she “felt [her] brain go giddy” (“An Incident by the Sea” 27 Dec. 1889). READING LILY LEWIS A Biocritical Study

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Here, in the poem, “dusty, giddy heat” fills the car. Louis Lloyd “looked into the flower as one looks into the face of a living thing.” This speaker imagines the face of the woman as “crumpled tea-roses, perhaps.” In the poem, the train “sped more quickly and more quickly,” recalling earlier descriptions of Canadian travels when a horse and carriage sped “away and away” across the open prairie (“Louis Lloyd’s Letters” 18 Oct. 1888) and when a pleasure yacht similarly “sped away and away” into the pine woods of British Columbia (“Louis Lloyd’s Letter” 28 Dec. 1888). The small intertextual connections between these poems and Lily Lewis’s earlier sketches have the effect of broadening the subject, of translating a mediated but still individual “I” into the larger “I” we are taught to perceive in poetry. The story of one woman who disappears thus becomes the story of many women for whom sustained public success might ultimately not have been possible. The still sketchy story of Lily Lewis’s later years has come together slowly, in bits and pieces. Lansing Lewis died before his grandson, Herbert Lewis, was born, and Mr. Lewis has told me that as he grew up he knew of his Great Aunt Lily only as a rather shadowy figure in the family history, as someone who had begun life with great promise and later brought much trouble to the family, and whose life ended tragically. The letters and documents that have surfaced in the course of my research have helped to fill in some gaps, to outline, indirectly and incompletely, a sad story of obsession, misunderstanding and alienation. The first indication of disharmony appears in Lily’s mother’s will of 13 September 1895. Matilda Caroline Snowdon directs that out of the revenues of her net income, $900 per annum be paid to her daughter, Lily Lewis, wife of Roland Rood, during 96

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the lifetime of Lily Lewis. If one of the other of her children should die, the remainder would be divided among everybody except Lily Lewis, and her annuity be increased to $1200 per annum. In a document dated 15 April 1897, Matilda Snowdon places her entire estate in a trust fund to be administered jointly by John MacIntosh, a lawyer, and Lansing Lewis, authorizing that the donor’s daughter, Lily Lewis, be paid by monthly installments $900 per annum during her lifetime, “on her own receipt, without her husband’s authorization being required for the validity thereof and for her separate use, and upon the express condition that such annuity shall be for her aliment and incapable of being seized or taken in execution for her or her husband’s debts under any circumstances whatsoever, or of being assigned or anticipated by her without the consent of said Trustees.” The deed goes on to explain that “this trust is created by [the donor] to save her from the continual demands made upon her by her daughter Lily and to assure the donor’s said daughter a fixed income,” and that “[Matilda Snowdon’s] husband left her unconditionally all his property so that her daughter has nothing but what she chooses to allow her and that she considers the provision she is making for her to be as ample as she can make it without being unjust to herself or to her other children.” She further reserves the right to decrease the provisions she has made in her daughter’s favour and even to cut her off entirely, should her “said daughter” seek to vary the deed or take any action against the Trustees. Also present among these papers are a number of typed sheets dated 17th April 1897 – two days after the trust deed was signed and one day after Mrs. Lewis signed an agreement with a notary public granting power of attorney to her trustees READING LILY LEWIS A Biocritical Study

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– and headed, “Notes by Lansing Lewis for an interview with Mrs. Rood and Mr. Sanford,” apparently in preparation for a meeting in New York with Lily and her lawyer. Lansing lists among his objectives in seeking this meeting a desire to inform Mrs. Rood that the trust has been created, that her mother is now powerless to change its terms, and that Mrs. Rood “is entirely free of her family as she has desired” to be, but “she must in future leave them alone” and thus put “an end to the long series of disturbances.” He states his intention to produce his father’s will to show that everything was left to their mother. He refuses, at his mother’s request, to deliver or hand over any books to Mrs. Rood. “I know of the loans she has desired to make on them,” he says, and “when in time to come she has settled down,” she may have them. The final item in this set of notes is headed “As to the Divorce.” In it Lansing notes that “Mr. Rood has made overtures to Montreal for a Divorce,” and states that “if the divorce can be procured for such a sum as Mrs. Rood mentioned in her letters – and without creating a scandal greater than the divorce itself – I will cordially support the scheme. If she acts properly I would not like in any way to be a stumbling block in the annulment of an unfortunate marriage.” We can only assume that Lily Lewis felt entitled to some of the capital from her father’s estate after he died in 1891, and that debts and marriage troubles led to demands her family felt were unreasonable. The photograph of Lily taken in Italy and sent or given to “Lansing and Katie, with love” suggests that the rift in the relationship had not yet occurred in 1892. The final page of a letter signed “Ever your loving Lansing,” and presumably sent to his wife, mentions “the steamer” and speaks of spending some time in the Caledonian 98

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office and “a long time with the Roods.” This, too, suggests an amicable relationship extending at least until 1892. After spending some years in Winnipeg in the insurance business, Lansing returned to Montreal in 1892, where he became manager of the Caledonian Fire Insurance Company, and also of a subsidiary company in Paris. An oil painting by Roland Rood, originally the property of Herbert’s grandparents, Lansing and Katie Lewis, hangs in Cynthia and Herbert Lewis’s upstairs hallway, providing perhaps a final link to a time of family harmony. A letter from Lily’s sister Ella to Jennie Mead, a cousin in Mount Holyoke, provides a personal perspective on Lily’s letters and their repercussions. Ella apologizes for and expresses her distress over letters from Lily received by family members on both sides of the Atlantic and friends in Montreal. The letter implies that Lily has been complaining about Lansing’s role in the dispute, and Ella defends his actions. She writes of having given money to Lily on several occasions and having been continually importuned for more, and of receiving “two of the most cruel letters which could possibly have been penned.” She notes, too, how their mother’s and Lansing’s health has been “undermined” by all this unpleasantness. She refers several times to the distress that Lily and Albert have caused, without further elaborating on how, precisely, Albert has contributed to the suffering endured by the rest of the family. The files contain a couple of other items referring to Albert’s estrangement from the family. In a legal letter of 1899, three years before her death in 1902, Matilda Lewis expresses her wish to hand over her personal estate to Lansing, noting that “Ella doesn’t want anything” and “Lily and Albert have gone away for good.” In a READING LILY LEWIS A Biocritical Study

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letter headed “Vancouver” and dated “8/11/00,” Edward (as the note is signed) states that he wishes to renounce his portion of the estate “in favor of Lansing Lewis and Katie Bate his wife and their children,” stating as his reason “the trouble I have caused them and Katie’s universal – more than kind common sense behavior under very trying circumstances in connection with all our family.” Albert Edward’s escapades add a rather colourful chapter to the family’s stories. According to Herbert Lewis, Albert and Herbert Lewis, the Welsh cousin who later became a member of parliament, were close and often went together, sometimes also accompanied by Lloyd George, the friend who later became the British prime minister, on “pleasure-seeking” trips to the Continent and even to South America. The most outrageous of the stories describes how Albert disappeared one day, leaving behind his wife and numerous debts. His cloak was found in a field with a bullet through it, and a Pinkerton detective eventually tracked him down in Japan. He disappeared from the family story until 1974, when Cynthia and Herbert Lewis, having recently moved to Vancouver from Montreal, noticed that a stained glass window in an Anglican church on Burrard Street had been donated by Herbert’s great uncle. Albert Edward had become a prominent citizen of the city and had presumably donated the window to make up for past misdeeds. I recently learned that the Redpath Museum at McGill University has in its possession a collection of objects from the South Pacific, sent by Albert Lewis to his father in 1881 and later donated to the museum by his nephew, Mostyn Lewis (Lansing’s son).44

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The photograph of Lily and Albert together (Illustration 6, p. 56), taken on the same day as the photograph of the entire family (Illustration 5, pp. 54–55), suggests a special closeness between these particular siblings that might have resulted from similarly adventurous and rebellious temperaments. Lily’s remarks about her brother in her letter of 1889 confirm such an affinity: “How is Albert?” she asks. “Tell him from me that he is a gilt edge brick. You cannot imagine how proud I was when a brother who could write me such a letter as his last [sic]. It was so kind, so thoughtful, so generous and if I fail to show him I am worth his thoughts – .” There is no further textual connection between Lily and Albert; however, Lewis family members recall at one time having either seen or simply heard about a number of pencil and watercolour sketches of Japanese scenes reportedly connected with Albert’s travels, and it seems not entirely unreasonable to wonder if these might have had a place in Lily Lewis Rood’s prospective “Little Book of Japanese Sketches.” Only four more items in the Lewis papers have to do with Lily: a letter to Lansing Lewis, dated June 29, 1926, from the secretary of the British National Society for Lunacy Reform, copies of two undated letters from Lansing – one addressed to “The Official Solicitor, Royal Courts of Justice” and the other to Lily – and a piece of paper containing the following notes: “1914: Dr. Robstone told Lily she had been made ‘Private.’ She said ‘I do not wish to be so.’ Later Dr. R. replied – ‘It was a mistake.’ – months afterwards Lily was sent to Broadmoor; i.e., a criminal asylum. Lily asked Dr. R. ‘Why?’ He replied ‘You have done some extraordinary things.’” Following up on this single reference to Broadmoor, I contacted the current manager READING LILY LEWIS A Biocritical Study 101

of medical records at Broadmoor Hospital, Crowthorne, who, in consultation with senior authorities and with the permission of Herbert Lewis, graciously granted me access to files pertaining to Lily Lewis Rood’s three-months’ residence in 1915 as a patient in what was then referred to as “the Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane” and also as “Broadmoor Lunatic Asylum.” While these records cover a relatively brief period, they nevertheless provide considerable information about Lily Lewis’s years as a mental patient in England. Included in the files are the photographs (reproduced in Illustration 10) taken on Lewis Rood’s admission to Broadmoor, and background information indicating that she was transferred there on 1 March 1914 after having been charged with “sending indecent packets through post,” and, instead of being sentenced, was declared “insane.” Some “Notes after Admission” include the following comments: Case of delusional insanity.… Has written the past few years, hundreds of letters and postcards to prominent people with a view to being visited so that she might ventilate her grievances concerning a “tomfool document” and “a forged deed” by which she has been robbed of money.… Receives £200 per annum under her mother’s will. There is a document, according to her statements, under which she should receive more.… [She] has the idea that there is a conspiracy against her to defraud her of the money [and] has written libelous postcards … to bring the matter to notice.… In March, 1914, was arrested for sending some of these postcards to foreign office – was certified insane and sent to Manor House. Today (3.3.15) has written a short note to Dr. Roberton with reference to Lloyd 102 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

George suggesting that he is acting a part in the conspiracy.… Removed to Coton Hill Asylum May 17, 1915.45

Any discrepancy between the allowance Lewis Rood was receiving and the amount specified in her mother’s trust agreement is unlikely, I think. A few notes or portions of notes written by Lily Lewis Rood referring to “guilty Scotsmen in Montreal and England,” and to someone who has been “coercing Roland Rood,” however, definitely do suggest the kind of irrational fixation described in the Broadmoor documents. The reference to Lloyd George, then Minister of Munitions, is significant. As Herbert Lewis suggests in his Foreword to this volume, Lily Lewis’s acquaintance with Lloyd George might have precipitated her initial arrest. Repeated accusations regarding his involvement in this perceived conspiracy might very well have been what led to criminal action being taken against her. Letters included in the Broadmoor files also reveal that family members intervened to procure and provide for private psychiatric care and “extra comforts,” probably for the remainder of Lily Lewis’s life. A letter to Broadmoor authorities from Lily’s sister Ella Lewis Hutchison, dated March 2, 1915, expresses consternation at her sister’s having been transferred to a criminal asylum and concern about her welfare, and articulates her desire that her sister be removed to a private institution. A letter from Florence Hughes inquires on behalf of Mrs. Hutchinson as to the reason for the transfer, and a reply from the medical superintendent concedes that “criminal lunatics had been removed from the London asylums owing to want of room.” Space was required for returning soldiers under the Military Hospital Agreement. READING LILY LEWIS A Biocritical Study 103

Also included among the records I received are some notes regarding details of the two transfers, a petition from Lily Lewis Rood asking to be returned to Holloway Prison and sentenced, and a letter from the medical superintendent denying the request. While “the baby who died” has been and remains a central feature of the Lewis family’s oral knowledge of Lily’s life, the only textual reference to this child I have found anywhere is an oblique statement in these records from Broadmoor. Beside “children” in the Admission information are the words, “none alive.” It is hard not to speculate that the death of a child in infancy might have played a huge part in all of the sad circumstances that the letters and documents reveal. The Coton Hill Institution for the Insane (earlier known as the Coton Hill Lunatic Asylum) at Stafford is described on its website as “a quadrangular pile of white brick … in the Elizabethan style, … erected in 1854 for Private Patients of the Middle and Upper Classes, … standing on an eminence, commanding extensive and picturesque views of beautiful woodland scenery.” The Lewis papers contain no letters or other records pertaining to Lily Lewis Rood’s time as a patient in this institution, and I have been unable to locate patient records for Manor House, Coton Hill, or Camberwell House, another private institution in Surrey – the institution to which the correspondence of 1926 refers and at which she resided at the time of her death. Three later letters briefly illuminate a final moment in Lily’s story. The one from Edward G. Smith, Secretary of the Society for Lunacy Reform, appears to be a reply to a request from Lansing to help make his sister see “some of the self-made difficulty of her position.” Lansing’s 104 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

letter to Lily refers to “the article you wrote, … another evidence of your literary ability” and to “Miss Royden’s address” that “portrays a state of affairs which certainly should not be allowed to exist.” Agnes Maude Royden (1876–1956), British preacher and social worker, was active in social reform movements, especially those involving women and health. I do not know whether the article to which Lansing refers or any other articles that Lily Lewis Rood might have written on this subject were published anywhere. It is interesting, just the same, to learn that this former New Woman was, at the end of her life, again participating in feminist discourses pertinent to her time and to her own particular situation. Lansing’s letter continues: “Following upon Mr. Smith’s remark to me that people like yourself might greatly benefit by living entirely separated from such surroundings and such an atmosphere I do not hesitate to say that I would be very glad to see such a change affected [sic] in your case.” He says he is “very glad” that Lily can go about the city freely under her parole, and that he and Ella join her in her desire “to be perfectly free.” Lily must, however, give the Official Solicitor “the simple guarantee” that “all undesirable communications,” “all references to the past,” and “all misconceptions” will discontinue. Finally, Lansing’s letter to the Official Solicitor, seemingly written several months later, expresses some second thoughts about supporting the Solicitor’s suggestion that his sister become a “volunteer boarder” at Camberwell House. He especially hopes that the head of Camberwell House would retain the power to curtail some of her liberties should people again be “annoyed” by frequent letters. Lily Lewis Rood still lived at Camberwell House when she died, of cancer, on 5 October READING LILY LEWIS A Biocritical Study 105

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1929. Lansing Lewis died in 1927; it is likely, therefore, that Lily’s sister Ella, perhaps assisted by Lansing’s widow Katie, arranged for her body to be returned to Montreal and buried in Mount Royal Cemetery with those of her parents and her brother. The photograph shown in Illustration 11 was taken by Herbert Lewis in 2001.46

10 Lily Lewis Rood. Broadmoor Asylum, Crowthorne, England, 1914. Courtesy of Broadmoor Hospital.(previous page) 11 John Lewis Family Plot, Mount Royal Cemetery. Montreal, 2001. Courtesy of Herbert Lewis.

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Conclusion: Sketching a Woman’s Life Quirks of history and personal circumstance thus allowed Lily Lewis to become “lost” to Canadian literary history. Personal struggles, illness, and alienation ended her career prematurely. Her exclusive participation in journalism when continued success and attention demanded a move to fiction, her “elsewhereness”47 when “Canadianness” increasingly became a criterion for Canadian literary attention, and canonical developments that privileged writing by men, granting entry to only a few select women writers,48 relegated the work she did produce to obscurity. Canadian theorist of women’s life writing, Marlene Kadar, claims that it is not enough to say that women’s writing has been undervalued or forgotten. Rather, she says, “the forgetting, itself, … must be read” (“Coming to Terms” 10); we must maintain a theoretical awareness of our own prejudices and assumptions when we read early women’s writing. Lewis has remained lost through several decades of feminist recovery projects, I would suggest, partly because of some habits and biases in contemporary scholarship that might have detracted from Lewis’s appeal as a subject and thus left her on the sidelines of research. When we study early women’s travel writing, for example, we look for resistance to imperialism and patriarchy. We want to find in early writing impulses towards social reform and assertions of community, as opposed to elitism and individualism. When we study women’s life writing, we want access to private as well as public texts. We value aesthetic merit, despite our stated focus on cultural contexts. Perhaps most importantly, despite our postmodern valorizing of open-endedness and fragmentation, we want the whole story 110 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

when we seek to recover a writer’s life and work, however impossible that might be to obtain. I must acknowledge that while I have worked with an awareness of these biases within scholarly discourses, my choices for inclusion and commentary in this volume have probably been influenced to some extent by my own participation in them. Because of the many choices I have been forced to make as biographer, historian, literary critic, anthologist, and editor, this volume is but one of an endless number of possible sketches of Lily Lewis. The sketch as a genre was crucial in the development of Canadian literary expression in the nineteenth century, and, internationally, it allowed women writers a unique blend of public and private voice that enabled them to transform notions of the literary and to begin to tell their own stories in their own ways. Reflective as well as descriptive, an outgrowth of the eighteenthcentury periodical essay and the more personal graphic description in the “Mary Mitford” vein, the sketch proved popular in Victorian Canada when newspapers and magazines were the main outlet for writers. Later, in post-Confederation Canada, it provided a form in which literary and cultural criticism could develop in a new country. With its simplicity, its less precise and more aesthetic quality, the sketch, both verbal and visual, began internationally in the Romantic period increasingly to become a vehicle by which women could move into the public sphere without loss of propriety. Blurring the edges of the picture and clarifying parts of the centre, the sketch altered the idea of the picturesque in landscape aesthetics. With its open-endedness and its moments of clarity within an otherwise indistinct background, the sketch matches the O.E.D. definition of a “vig­ nette”: “an illustration not in a definite border, a READING LILY LEWIS A Biocritical Study 111

photograph with a background gradually shaded off, short description, character sketch.” Lily Lewis left almost no autobiographical accounts to tell her story, but as Carolyn Heilbrun asserts in Writing a Woman’s Life, “the most remarkable autobiographical accounts of women writers have often been tucked away into other forms” (13), and Lewis’s many sketches, I contend, constitute one such form. This volume, with its blending of voices, its juxtaposition of sketches, its incompleteness, is my attempt to create a larger vignette, a partial but still illuminating sketch of one particular woman’s life and work.

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Notes to Part Two 1 Many writers and readers condemned the French writer and others of his school for the lack of idealism that they saw as characterizing naturalist fiction. 2 The entry on Lansing Lewis in Roberts and Tunnell mentions Dr. Carpenter’s Private School, and a note in the Lewis Papers includes Lansing and Albert among former students attending a reunion of Dr. Carpenter’s students. 3 I have checked any records still in existence for private high schools for women in the Westmount and bordering Montreal areas, to no avail. According to a member of the Westmount Historical Association, however, the daughters of elite Montrealers were quite often educated in private homes. 4 Jerome’s Stage-Land (Chatto & Windus, 1889) is a compilation of humorous essays on stage characters. Jones conflates the words of Jerome’s title to express the idea of unreality that she associates with her perception of Venice. Throughout this sketch, Jones self-consciously composes an impression of Venice enriched by her experience of earlier writers’ works. 5 Richard Stein, in The Ritual of Interpretation, describes Ruskin’s aesthetic of perception as one that encompasses movement and change, and he gives as an example the “many coloured mists” that “float” among distant spires (69) in Ruskin’s literary evocation of J.M.W. Turner’s paintings of Venice. 6 In Culture and Anarchy, Arnold labels most members of the middle class “Philistines” for what he sees as their failure to live by the light of art and beauty. See especially Chapter One, “Sweetness and Light” (5880). 7 Buckler summarizes Pater’s position with regard to aesthetics and metaphysics, defining Pater’s “critical humanism” (Preface xiii) as spiritualism “without metaphysical illusions,” and “essential secularism” with “visionary qualities” (xii). 8 Alice Jones, for example, and another writer using the signature “G.” 9 In a series of sketches later collected as Our Village (1824–39), Mitford conducts her readers on informal rambles through the British countryside, and her

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10 11

12

13 14 15 16

17

18 19

style was much imitated in prose sketches by other writers. In The Private Capital, Gwyn outlines the research and “detective work” through which she identified “Amaryllis.” See New 87–92, “Currents of Ideas,” for a more comprehensive discussion about “the shaping English-Canadian ideas” (87) of the latter years of the nineteenth century. The ideas that shaped the thinking of this period are also dealt with in Berger, The Sense of Power, Cook, The Regenerators, and McKillop, A Disciplined Intelligence. Referred to by New as “the most important Canadian movement of the nineteenth century” (118), the “Confederation Group” included Sir Charles G. D. Roberts, Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman, Duncan Campbell Scott, William Wilfred Campbell, and Isabella Valency Crawford. All strove to engender a sense of Canadian tradition through poetry rooted in place. This announcement is pasted in the flyleaf of a copy of A Social Departure lent to me by Herbert Lewis. The title of the newspaper and the date are not included. Prominent People in the Province of Quebec N. pag. This letter, the property of Herbert Lewis, presumably was received by Lansing Lewis in 1888. (See Appendix B-1.) In “Destination Nation,” Kevin Flynn notes some frequently occurring opinions expressed by travellers crossing Canada on the CPR, some of which both Lewis and Duncan similarly express. In “‘Our Next Neighbour Across the Way’: Japan and Canadian Writers,” Susan Fisher discusses the treatment of Japan and the Japanese in a number of travel accounts by Canadian writers, and she deals specifically with Duncan’s application of this theory in A Social Departure. I have found the theory equally applicable to both Duncan’s and Lewis’s newspaper accounts of the journey. Duncan refers to the Canadian Pacific Railway as “the Cipiar” in her article “Winnipeg Whisperings.” In “Genre and Gender in Sara Jeannette Duncan’s Travel Satire,” Denise Heaps likens Duncan’s use of this technique of presenting exaggerated aesthetic

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20 21 22 23 24

25

26 27

28

29

30

images and then deflating them in A Social Departure to Mark Twain’s travel satire. Ontario Orangeman Thomas Scott was executed in 1870 by a provisional government established in an earlier Métis insurrection led by Riel. Davin’s report of this interview was published in the Regina Leader 19 November 1885. Herstory Calendar, 1979. Duncan describes the visit with Warner in Grafton’s “Cow Catcher Comments.” Commercial Union was a policy, supported by the Liberal Party in Canada, of promoting freer trade between Canada and the United States. It developed in response to a depression in Canada resulting from the Métis rebellions, and it lost ground in the 1890s to a policy favouring imperial unity and the maintenance of strong ties with Britain (Berger 4). Just prior to embarking upon this venture, Duncan had been a guest in New York of Chaz Wiman, owner of the New York and Toronto Globe and a vocal American proponent of Commercial Union. Both Louis Lloyd and Garth Grafton note in their accounts that they are reading Mrs. Ward’s recently published and critically controversial novel about a minister who embraces a secular theology. Goldwin Smith was a prominent Canadian supporter of Commercial Union. Izaak Walton (1593–1683), editor, biographer, and literary philosopher, published The Compleat Angler, Or The Contemplative Man’s Recreation in 1653. (See Baugh 609–12.) In Ruskin and St. Mark’s, John Unrau writes of how Ruskin’s evocation of St. Mark’s in The Stones of Venice “creates a marvelous atmosphere of spatial mystery” (Unrau 145) with its “astonishing gradation” (168) of colour, its “indescribable tints . . . [and] textures of colour” (169). Duncan describes the vase in similar terms. “Venice,” Italian Hours 3–40. See also Graham Good’s chapter “Henry James: Patterns of Art and Life” for a comprehensive treatment of James’s use of watercolour imagery in his descriptive writing. Garth Grafton describes this interview in her column of 19 January 1889.

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31 It is only fair to note that Louis Lloyd occasionally attributes an obsession with facts to Garth Grafton. Her account of the ride through the park in Vancouver provides an example. 32 In her Montreal Star column, Garth Grafton does not include Louis Lloyd in this recollection as the narrator includes Orthodocia in the novel. Grafton says, “I remembered that I should see mountains with towers and minarets” (“Cow Catcher Comments”). 33 See Appendix B-2. 34 See Appendix B-3. 35 See “ART,” “F. H.,” and Gilbert Parker, for example. 36 The Canadian writer Alice Jones travelled up the Nile on a “Ramses” steamer in 1895, and her accounts of the trip, “Nile Vignettes,” were published in The Week in July and August of that year. 37 Bergonzi defines fin de siècle as “a cultural attitude: the conviction that established norms of intellectual, moral, and social certainty are vanishing, together with the belief that new situations require new attitudes in life and art” (19). In a more limited sense, the term represents the gradual break with Victorian attitudes and forms that began before the turn of the century and culminated in what has come to be known as high modernism. 38 See Fink 386. 39 See Gerson, “Wild Colonial Girls,” Ardis, and Fiamengo for examples of this approach. 40 Kathryn Ready also discusses this novel in the context of fin de siècle decadence, and Faye Hammill examines A Social Departure in terms of decadence. 41 Gerd Bjorhovde and Elaine Showalter, for example, both discuss this tendency. 42 The language in the article is more conventionally romantic than that in the monograph: “Nature has made him [de Chavannes] one of her rare confidants” (107), for example, and “by and Bye he whispers again of summer … where the hills have shut out the day, and the muses are wakening to the fresh air” (108). 43 Page numbers refer to the original monograph, not to the transcription in this volume. 44 Information courtesy of Barbara Lawson, Curator of Ethnology, Redpath Museum, McGill University. 45 Records courtesy of Broadmoor Hospital.

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46 Gwyneth and Mostyn Lewis were the children of Lansing Lewis and Katherine Bate. Herbert Lewis is the son and only child of Mostyn Lewis and Helen McKim. 47 In an address at the 2004 annual meeting of the Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada, Carole Gerson described the international consciousness of many late-nineteenth-century Canadian writers as a combination of “Canadianness” and “elsewhereness.” 48 See Gerson, “Anthologies and the Canon of Early Canadian Women Writers.”

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Part Three

A Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood

Introduction Principles of Selection Because the entire body of Lily Lewis’s work that I have located is too copious to include in this volume, I have chosen to include an edited selection that I feel best exemplifies her work and at the same time elucidates those facets of it that I have specifically commented upon. For the sake of clarity, and to avoid misrepresentation, many of the sketches are included in their entirety. I wish to conceal neither the often-desultory nature of Lewis’s articles nor the fact that her writing only occasionally reveals a high degree of accomplishment. I have, however, elided parts of some articles, especially in the sketches in which Louis Lloyd describes her world tour with Sara Duncan (Garth Grafton), in order to present an overview of the sequence of this journey and convey a broad sense of Lewis’s impressions of the places they visited and the people they met. Of Lewis’s accounts as L.L. from Paris, Switzerland, and Italy, I have selected a few representative sketches. Examples from “Our Paris Letter” include L.L.’s meeting with Franz Liszt, her description of the pension that has been A Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood 121

crucial to my identifying L.L. as Lewis, an excerpt dealing with education in France, and a sketch illustrating the “flâneuse”-like character of the persona she reveals to her readers. An entire “Letter from Italy” includes L.L.’s impressions of Milan, Verona, and Venice, and an excerpt from an account from Florence exemplifies Lewis’s art criticism and includes a description of the Boboli Gardens that echoes a similar one by Henry James. Selections from Louis Lloyd’s “Montreal Letter” column include Lloyd’s visit to Montreal artist William Brymner’s studio and a visit to New York. This section begins and ends with two poems. Somewhat abbreviated versions of Lloyd’s first three accounts of the trip on the “Cipiar” include her impressions of their fellow passengers, some comments about the various settlements they visited, and a few highlights from her descriptions of their stopovers in Winnipeg and Regina. The 14 December 1888 entry is almost entirely complete, and describes the young women’s meeting with the American writer Charles Dudley Warner. The entire 28 December sketch from Vancouver is included, and illustrates the way in which Lewis’s sketches often tend to develop and expand a particular theme. The “Japanese Sketches,” of which I have included four of the eight printed in The Week, contain a few small elisions and include descriptions of the two journalists’ arrival, an interview with a Japanese reporter, sketches of Lloyd’s “modern” and “traditional” Japanese friends, and their departure, with a stop in the Nagasaki of Pierre Loti’s Madame Crysanthème. “An Incident By the Sea,” describing Colombo, Ceylon, is complete, as I have discussed much of it in conjunction with Duncan’s corresponding 122 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

account and Lewis’s later writing. A short excerpt from “A Sunday in Calcutta” illustrates Lewis’s negative reaction to that place and also her openness to foreign customs and beliefs. Of Lloyd’s nine accounts from Paris in the summer of 1889, I have chosen to include the Montreal Star sketch of 8 June 1889 in its entirety; it definitively connects Lloyd to Lewis’s earlier L.L., and, like the Vancouver sketch, it develops a particular theme. In her sketch of 15 July 1889, also included in its entirety, Lloyd writes about some Canadian artists working in Paris. Of the three “Parisian Personalities” I have located, I have included the one describing the Princess Gortschakoff, the woman with whom Lewis purportedly later travelled up the Nile. Transcriptions of the two prose poems and the monograph about Puvis de Chavannes by Lily Lewis Rood complete the selections. Original spelling, punctuation, and grammatical construction has been retained. Misspelled words and blatant grammatical errors are followed by “[sic],” but French words with accents omitted are not.

A Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood 123

Sketches

L.L.

“Our Paris Letter”

Our Paris Letter The Week 22 April 1886

Franz Liszt in Paris As we waited in the crowd for the theatre doors to open a very remarkable figure passed us. Slightly stooping, in long black cloak, with a mass of silver hair falling from beneath a low beaver hat: a figure that could never go by unnoticed. But, when the face turned towards us, a tremor passed through our frame – it was Liszt. High up among “the gods,” straining our necks in every direction, we at length caught sight of our hero in a loge below. Saint-Saëns, Diémer, Madame Viardot, and Madame Munkaczy, the wife of the famous artist who is at present painting his portrait, were with him. Leaning slightly on the former cantatrice’s chair, and turning smilingly from one fair satellite to another, he was in no way changed from the Liszt of long ago, who, at a Parisian Soirée, bent in silent admiration over the superb shoulders of Madame de X. “Monsieur l’Abbe!” cried the lady starting. “Pardon me, madame, but I was merely looking to see if your wings are growing.” It was the last of the Colonne concerts, which, with the Lamoureux, take place every Sunday afternoon during the winter months, in the Chatelet and Eden Theatres. The word soon flew from mouth to mouth that Liszt was in the hall, but it was not generally known until after the performance of one of his poèmes symphoniques, when a perfect thunder of applause burst forth, and cries of “Liszt,” echoed 128 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

on every side. He rose in his loge, but that was not enough, they would have him on the stage. Then he came forward leaning on the arm of Colonne. The audience were now in a phrenzy of excitement. It was a perfect ovation. “Au piano!” cried one thoughtless enthusiast; “au piano?” – alas! the tremendous virtuoso is no more. We may never hear again the “thunderer,” as they used to call him, but the great artist is still with us, the great artist with his benign, beautiful face, smiling on all men. “Disdaining none of God’s creations, nor the beauties of nature,” Grand Seigneur in every detail, lavish with love and lucre alike. Never artist applies to him in vain for aid. No wonder the acclamations and enthusiasm he awakened years ago once more resound at the sight of him. I was waiting at the Hotel de Calais in no small perturbation for an answer to the message I had left. What was my surprise when Liszt sent word down he would receive me. The Russian princess or the little music student, it is all the same so long as they hold the passport of worship. As I sat in the parlour the door of an adjoining room opened, and Liszt stood before me. It was a pardonable burst of enthusiasm to rush forward and kiss his hand, but he smiled and said, “No, no,” while he kissed me in return. It is difficult to describe the charm of those eyes, in which the light has burnt so steadily for seventy-five years; that face encircled by the thick mass of silver hair. Liszt seems, as it were, the embodiment of the highest concept of art – strong and gentle, beautiful and calm. The Church of St. Eustache was crowded on the 25th for the audition of the master’s “Messodo Gran,” given in aid of the religious schools of the 2nd Arrondissement. It was a glorious sight, that vast, magnificent church flooded by the mid-day A Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood 129

sun, and especially did the light seem to fall upon the figure seated in the crimson chair in the orchestra’s midst. To be present at this Mass was Liszt’s chief object in coming to Paris. Conducted by Colonne, the master seemed well pleased with its interpretation. Feted and adored in every salon, the Paris of old has in no way changed for Liszt. Once more he is covered with flowers and palms, once more besieged by his legion of admirers, and now he is about to return to Weimer, and we shall hold nothing but a memory, an inaffably [sic] sweet memory of him who spoke the thoughts of Paradise. “In such sweet tones of our humanity.” L.L., April 4, 1886.

A Paris Pension The Week 6 May 1886

The Frenchman is a sort of bureau de placement personified. No matter whether one comes to Paris to improve one’s mind, one’s body, or one’s toilet, he is ever ready with recommendations, and has at his command a score of professors, doctors, and tailors. Your own particular physician is always sure to be a charlatan, and your singing master an ignoramus. Alas that the foreigner should so soon catch this spirit; and we, ere long, find ourselves persecuted not only by the Gaul, but by our fellow Saxon. No.__ was a charming pension, but our little friend, Mr. Harmonious, had discovered another, which he assured us was an earthly paradise. It was on the fifth étage, naturally, but of a most beautiful house, situated on the banks of the 130 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

Seine. The entrance to this mansion was superb: the grand staircase of coloured marble, the concierge’s room, princely; but nothing can so well describe the charms of this pension as the erudite landlady’s card – (Authentic): MADAM JEAN B__., Diploma from Academy. First-class Family Home. Boarders for learn French. Furnace, lifts in house No.__, Avenue M__.

There are certain peculiarities which Parisian pension-keepers possess as a genus. Whether these are real or factitious, they are, nevertheless, flaunted before the eyes of every stranger, upon whose lack of insight the Frenchman flatters himself with astounding complacency. You will invariably find that your landlady is the granddaughter, the niece, or second cousin of a count. She has lost her fortune – but any amount over a franc is a fortune in France – during the dreadful war of 1870, and finally she and that Jack-of-all-trades, her husband, not to break entirely with their old habits of elegance and luxury, are pleased to permit a few friends to share their vie de famille, that they may not be forced to retire to more humble quarters. No. __ is saved by its situation. The view from the windows of that now famous fifth étage is unsurpassed in Paris. On the other side of the place or square, facing which the house stands, flows the Seine Sous les milles falots assises en souveraine. To the west, rising like a rampart against the sky, the hill of Meudon, dotted with white villas; to the south, that vast sea of houses above which towers the domes of Les Invalides, and the Panthéon; and far away to the east, through a veil A Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood 131

of mist, Notre Dame; to the north, the heights of Monmartre [sic]; and one has only to walk out upon one’s balcony to view this magnificent panorama. In Paris there are artists and artists. The Frenchman, the Russian, the Swede manage to be quite happy in the tumble-down old pensions de famille of the exterior boulevards, or the funny little rooms of the Latin quarter, but with the worthy Saxon it is another thing. If he is exigent at home, he is ten times more so when abroad. Then, with most of the Americans who come to Europe to study, art is not a matter of bread. They may have to put their talent in the market some day, but they inwardly hope and pray that hour may never arrive. In the meantime they are in Paris, and their life at times reflects some very pretty daydreams. But alas! the rushes of cold reality are not infrequent. Our pension was a perfect nest of artists. But this had its disadvantages. Imagine eight pianos, two violins and five cantatrices all going at once. No wonder the occupants of the étages revolted. Alas for the musician who dared to strike a chord after nightfall. If his room happened to be on the court, his efforts were instantly drowned by cries, from garret to basement – “Down with the wretched instrument!” “To the guillotine, the violin!” Dinner-time was one of our few moments of respite. Then gathered in the dimly-lit dining-room, a heterogeneous mass indeed. At the center of the table sits the landlady, with eyes and ears always on the strain, smiling, rusé, coquettish, a mass of pose. Opposite, her husband, ever ready to talk of things he most ignores, but prudently changing ground when a stronger foe comes on the field. Coward in all 132 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

things, awkwardly polite, he is the type of a certain class, a class fortunately not large. We have the proud sensitive Dane, the sarcastic little Swiss governess, the thoughtful, shiftless Russian, with her eternal “que faire!” the argumentative little English correspondent, who plays at an unended game of cross-purposes with the world in general, and his pretty vis à vis in particular – four sisters, Americans, whose conversation has more than the usual amount of dashing assertion, condemnation and aplomb. With these latter and a few others, we form the Saxon colony, the despair of our hostess, who sighs to the British correspondent – “Alas! that I cannot understand your beautiful langue.” (Her mind truly French, ever turns to the same point.) “Imagine if one of your countrymen were to write to me in English, ‘I love you,’ alas, I might read it, ‘I love you not.’” “True,” replied the Britisher coldly, “Then, I suppose if he were to say, ‘I love you not,’ you would translate it, ‘I adore you.’” Sooner or later, at every meal, some unfortunate individual throws the apple of discord into the midst of the assembly, by a wretched remark which instantly leads to a fiery international discussion. In such cases, the solitary Canadian – and thus should it always be – sits smilingly upon the fence. It is not the American, but the Americaine, who has gained the Frenchman’s heart. It is interesting to see how this storm in a tea-pot resembles the tempest on the sea. Our poor Britisher often stands alone, but his coolness and causticity, as usual, bear him through. If one would find out the real cause of Anglophobia, so prevalent, alas! and for which a Pasteur will be hard to find, we must look beyond the patriotism of flowery phrases, down into the long grass where a little green snake lies coiled. A Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood 133

Our discussion is not over, but dinner is, and they unceremoniously put out the lights, so we are forced to rush back to work, each one as he goes down the hall instinctively humming a national anthem. L.L.

Our Paris Letter The Week 22 July 1886

With the exception of professors and students, most of those intending to invade the fields and plains during the summer months have left town. The remaining unfortunates are resigning themselves to ice-eating and drives by moonlight in the Bois.… These months of June and July are times of immense excitement for French students. Few outsiders are aware of their surprising capacity for work. They have a quickness of comprehension, a power of concentration, not a little remarkable. It may, perhaps, be said of them that “they see further than any others at the first glance;” but, alas! the “second sight” is that which is lacking. Every year scientific studies become more popular, and before the end of the century they will have a decided pre-eminence over belles-lettres. The engineer is at present the ideal of young France, in spite of the vigorous efforts of some to turn his mind towards literature. However, we can’t much deplore any departure from the morbid sentimentality so prevalent some sixty years ago. It is interesting to mark the vast improvement made lately in woman’s education in France. The convent is practically a thing of the past; the College Sévigné, Lycée Fenelon, and the Normal 134 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

Schools of Fontenay, Aux Roses, and Sevres replace it. Not a little edifying is the interest manifested in Plato and Descartes by the young ladies of the superior classes. Where men have gone far women have gone further – there is an absolute ostracism of all religious instruction in these schools. Instead of the much-abused morning papers, “the sweet girl graduates” are united to meditate on some passage from the works of a great moralist. It remains to be seen if this will have any influence on the morality of those charming young Frenchwomen, “who are captivating,” says one of their greatest admirers, “but who lie like demons!” There is one thing which will save the “higher education of women” from much ridicule in France: the French girl is too innate a coquette ever to degenerate into the spectacled, corsetless, blue-stocking, society’s bane, alas! in so many other countries.… L.L., Paris, July 6, 1886.

Our Paris Letter The Week 23 September 1886

None but Englishmen should be permitted to remain in Paris during the latter part of August. We have had the most demoralising weather you can imagine. For the past two weeks most people have appeared to little better advantage than a good “catch” of unfortunate fish cast upon a mossy bank. But in spite of heat, fire, and tempest – il faut s’amuser. The last judgment day may be at hand tomorrow – it is no reason for missing tonight’s opera. Just behind the Palais de l’Industrie, between it and the river, all through the summer months A Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood 135

one sees fairy-like illumination among the trees, and hears very enlivening music. It is the Jardin de Paris, which, when other comforts fail, more than satisfies no small portion of French society. Entering the enclosure, for the Jardin de Paris is by no means free, you find yourself in a rather fantastic crowd. Everywhere under the trees are tables and chairs, tiny booths, and in the center a large platform for the band, which is encircled by a wide pavement of asphalt for the dancers. We have also an improvised stage, upon which rather droll performances are gone through – we have the English (Negro) minstrel, and the French nymph – a veritable nymph indeed! But all this is only a preliminary pastime in waiting for the serious business of the evening. The Jardin de Paris is the essence of all that is most Parisian. Nowhere can you so well examine the very core of French life as in these “bals de nuit.” At ten o’clock the dancing begins. Of course, excepting in the waltzes and polkas, none but the “professional” dancers take part. These latter form themselves into groups of four, and are closely surrounded by admiring spectators. It is needless to say that the performance is not a little astounding. From his abashed, yet infinitely satisfied expression, and inevitable hunting-cap, you distinguish the Englishman, the most interested of onlookers. Between the dances you have an opportunity of studying the motley company, seated or walking beneath the illuminated trees. We find a charming little Russian who evidently has “come to see,” and we find an endless number of Frenchwomen who have come to be seen. We remark a grave gentleman, “decorated,” and of thoughtful mien; watch his capture by that gay butterfly fluttering round. First there is a glance which greatly disconcerts the grave gentle136 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

man, who hesitates, but finally stops in his walk. Another glance breaks his rigid lips into a smile; a few words sets his heart aglow. But it is going too far, he must leave. Then comes the look of two despairing eyes, and the sudden, pathetic touch upon his arm. “The spirit is willing,” etc., etc. The grave, decorated gentleman of sixty is caught! After the dancing is over there is a grand display of fireworks and the ball closes. We have here, by far, the most popular field of Parisian summer amusements. Some enterprising “restaurateurs” have had the good sense to pick out some charming little spots in the environs of the city, to which it is not difficult to be beguiled in the sultry evenings. Driving westwards along the banks of the Seine, in whose waters the red, yellow, and blue lights of the boats and bridges are beginning to tremble, you reach, after an hour or so, the town of Meudon. We were going to the “Hermitage,” a cozy little nook of some renommée. On the outskirts of the town, near the entrance to the wood, a fair was being held; these fairs, with the French, are a perfect mania which rages from June to November. Always the same fiendish-looking dolls, which one must “fell” with balls; fortune-tellers, shooting booths, “merry-go-rounds,” and dancing in clouds of dust. But at the fair at Meudon I found a nouveauté. Over the door of a miniature improvised theatre, “La tentation de St. Antoine, ce soir,” was announced. When we entered the wood it was quite dark, but when we returned, the harvest moon had risen, piercing, every here and there, the night with silver lances. The garden of this “Restaurant de l’Hermitage” is filled with tiny rustic houses where one may dine. There, in the depths of the A Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood 137

Meudon wood, “far from the madding crowd,” sipping iced champagne under an August moon, with the perfume of new-mown hay stealing in at the door, one finds for some moments a haven of rest from Paris heat. Another odd but charming little summer restaurant is at Ville d’Avary, where one dines on the banks of a bewitching lake, which, in the rising mist and the moonlight, seemed enchanted. Rushing home on top of the train, where seats are placed that tourists may better see the country, an old Frenchwoman beside me exclaimed, as she viewed the pretty but very innocent scenery: “And they, the strangers, ask us why we don’t travel!” L.L., Paris, Sept. 7, 1886.

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“Letters from Italy” Letter from Italy The Week 13 January 1887

In my slight sketch of Milan an unpardonable oversight was the non-mention of by no means the least interesting and important of its treasures – the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, the neighbouring Piazza de’ Mercanti, and Santa Maria Delle Grazzie. The famous library, with its wilderness of book-lined walls, was founded in 1609 by Federigo Borromeo, – a very grave and worthy receptacle for the precious documents that lie shivering, glass-cased and shelved in the silent halls: The Codice Atlantico, a collection of original drawings and MSS. of Leonardo da Vinci; a Virgil, with marginal notes by Petrarch; letters of Tasso, Galileo, and many others; and lastly, evincing more than all a spirit of hero-worship, the gloves Napoleon I. wore at Waterloo. Fully to realize those inspiring scenes, replete with life and colour, so dear to the author of “Romola,” the effervescence of a thousand hearts, the full play of the brute that is in us, one must have beheld the principal piazza of some Italian town, surrounded by palatial edifices, and with the oft-accompanying loggia, or open hall, built on to one of these latter. Picture such a “square” filled with gesticulating, shouting, chattering men – only that of the Mercanti today is but a modern “Exchange.” In spite of Mr. Mark Twain’s opinion to the effect that he always found the surpassing worth of the copies; in spite of the ever-advancing work of destruction, Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece in the refectory of the suppressed A Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood 139

monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie holds still all its marvelous power. As in painting, so in music and other arts – only those who have given serious hours to their study have a right to criticize. There is infinite absurdity therefore in demanding, or even expecting, anything other than a more or less worthless criticism from the hundred and one open-mouthed starers, to whom a potato is a pear if you call it such, and the difference between “La Mascotte” and “Lohengrin” appears about as mazy as their own sentiments in general. But “The Last Supper” is among the few compositions which, it seems, even the least skilled in matters artistic may, to a certain degree, appreciate; a ground where common and higher humanity can meet. “Verona, a public place.” Enter Sampson and Gregory. It is even so, and all the time one is strutting the Lyceum boards, or dodging some infuriated villain around the card-board houses of the Grand Opera. The picturesque, toga-like cloak, so popular among Italians of the middle and lower classes, though charming in daylight, has an aspect sinister and threatening enough at night, especially when its wearer moves swiftly and shadow-like through streets dimly lighted, narrow, and mysterious. There is an air very captivating about this unique little town. Its piazza and its palaces, its amphitheatre and its memories, must endear it to all. The vast arena, built A.D. 290, capable of seating twenty thousand spectators, and affording standing room to almost as many more, though much repaired, gives a perfect idea of similar structures of its time. But the Piazza delle Erbe is really the gem among the many attractions of Verona. It is market day, and in the square scores of white umbrellas cover as many stalls. The sellers are ugly old hags, and the 140 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

men unattractive, but you forget this under the glorious sky, in the sparkling air, and the colours of the abundant fruit are rich and warm. To the north of the Piazza rises a marble column, bearing a lion of St. Mark, indicating down to 1787 the supremacy of the Republic of Venice. At the corner to the right the Casa Mazzanti, once the residence of Albertine della Scala, the Palazzo Trezza (1668), the Casa de’ Mercanti (1301), now containing the commercial court, and the fresco-decorated houses, add to the charm of the scene. By a short street to the left the Piazza de’ Signori is reached, a paved open space surrounded by delightful old buildings. Here rises a marble statue of Dante, simple and infinitely pleasing. Hard by is the house in which the “divine poet” lived when an exile from Florence, 1316. In the north-east corner of the Piazza stands the old town hall, which, with its charming loggia, is among the most exquisite pieces of Renaissance architecture one can find. Moving southward hence, in a certain Via Cappello we discover a house prodigiously tall, very narrow and plain and dark, and with a large archway in it leading to an extremely uninviting courtyard. Alas, alas! where are now the balcony, the orchard, the nightingale, and the lark? For here lived, so it is said, that “Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear.” Looking about us at all the melancholy decay, we half wish these once bewitching scenes had perished too, perished with all the love and loveliness that dwelt within them. For now it is as if some coffin-lid had been withdrawn, and we beheld only the ghastly relics of some cherished form. “A churchyard; in it a monument belonging to the Capulets.” But the churchyard is to-day no more, a withered garden supplanting it, and the monument, a small, partly-restored chapel A Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood 141

adjoining a suppressed Franciscan monastery. In this lies a medieval sarcophagus, empty but for the thousand cards of more or less interesting pilgrims to the Tomba di Giulietta. Poor Juliet! We cannot even say, “Thy canopy is dust and stones;” but, after all, what matter, since thy example, the immortal part of thee, is with us: That while Verona by that name is known, There shall no figure at such rate be set As that of true and faithful Juliet.

In summer time even the saddest heart can mask itself with smiles; to discover all the real bitterness and longings one must creep into the dark, cold chamber unnoticed, when a December wind beats its wings against the window-pane. For the troups [sic] of eager travellers that go in warmer months to feast their eyes upon her beauty, Venice must perforce wear a far different aspect; but for the few wanderers of this colder season she makes no effort to hide the deep melancholy which hangs over her like some sad mist, that now, alas! there is no hope a future sunrise may dispel. It is neither moonlight nor May. A drizzling rain falls. The few lamps flicker faintly. The water in the canals is very dark, and the gondola very hearselike. One fears to speak above a whisper. All the weird beauty seems of such stuff that dreams are made of, and our first journey through this city of the dead, a Dantesque expedition indeed. There are two ways in which we may contemplate the wounded Lion of St. Mark – “It is a wonderful, beautiful beast,” – and pass coldly on, and we may linger in infinite grief watching the slowly fading life. It would be hard to imagine a city in the fate of which all are compelled to take some interest. To-day the dead bride of the sea, but lovely still, 142 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

for “hers is the loveliness in death, that parts not quite with parting breath.” Float with me down the Grand Canal. Nothing in the world could be more comfortable than these charming gondolas, with their luxuriant cushions, and their imperceptible motion. The watery path is paved with the reflex of purple and red from a winter sunset that changes to burnished gold the palace window panes. And we have on either side an almost unbroken line of princely buildings. Here lived Byron; in that exquisite Palazzo Vendramin Calergi died Richard Wagner, in ’83; and this is the Ca d’Oro, with its delicate façade in the pointed style, the most perfect gem of all. Amidst such silent grandeur, where the only sound is the cry of a gondolier, or the plash of his oar as he guides his swan-like bark, a dreadful “vaporetti” is brought, whistling rudely and vomiting smoke, and rushing wildly about like some small demon. Alas! alas! When we have converted our flower gardens into cornfields, and built our houses with the broken statues of the gods, what then? We hear a good deal of what should be done for “the people,” but though “the people” form by far the larger portion of humanity, they fortunately certainly do not compose that part most to be considered. The question is simply this – are the lovely places on earth, and Heaven knows there are few enough, to be opened carelessly to the curiosity of the multitude, or preserved for the appreciation of the few? We will enter one of these grave palaces, but one, perhaps, where ruin is more apparent. Its present owner is in Florence or Rome. A bleak staircase leads to the first apartments. The once gorgeous dancing-saloon is now placed at the disposal of artists to distribute the pictures they

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desire to sell. And parallel with this, a long suite of grand deserted rooms, where the silken cushions are threadbare, and the countless objects of art lie unadmired, rotting in solitary splendour. The chambers of the upper apartment once sheltered soldiers, whose habitual Vandalism seems in no way to have been modified on this occasion. à Venice, à l’affreux Lido, Où vient sur l’herbe d’un tombeau, Mourir la pale Adriatique. L.L., Bologna, Dec. 19, 1886

Letter from Italy The Week 7 April 1887

... The Rialto of Florence is the Ponto Vecchio, a most picturesque old bridge, lined on either side with goldsmiths’ shops. It leads us to the left bank of the river, much less interesting, of course, than the right, but where we find two places in which we may linger long – the Pitti Palace and the Boboli Gardens. The former literally dazzles by the magnificence of its paintings. Of hardly one have you not seen a score of copies. There are no fewer than a dozen Raphaels; the early Florentine period is well represented, and we find some grand works from the Venetian school. The portraits of the former are among some of his best, while his “Madonnas” and “Vision of Ezekial” captivate one entirely. Especially charming are the “Madonna del Granduca” and the “Madonna della Sedia,” the half-concealed beauty of the one, rejoicing over the child with tender bashfulness; the other, strong and proud, yet gentle and

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motherly withal. In the “Vision” we have the most exquisite little gem – the Almighty is borne in the air by angels. Only I wonder why He is always the same terrifying figure. Strange, men’s imagination has never pictured Him the most glorious embodiment of manhood in His prime – of mighty power, yet merciful, and gazing upon us with infinite pity. Surely the more conscious a great being is of strength, the less will he care to show it uselessly; and the truly skilled hand is always the least anxious to draw the sword from its velvet sheath; yet, instead of a benign Divinity we have invariably a Jupiter Tonans. This must be a very mistaken idea. Among the works of the Venetian school, Gior­ gioni’s charming “Concert,” a group, representing, it is said, Calvin, Luther, and Melanchthon, “La Bella di Tiziano,” and Lorenzo Lotto’s “Three Ages” stand out pre-eminently. Of the paintings of foreign artists there are not many; Reubens, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, and Valasquez have each a few works only. A portion of the Pitti Palace is set apart as the residence of the King and Queen when they visit Florence. Almost every city of importance in Italy had its Palazzo Reale, interminable suite of chilly rooms, sometimes unvisited for years. From the Boboli Gardens must we take our farewell view of Florence. There is something very fascinating about these deserted grounds. In summer, when a motley crowd dances upon les tapis verts, and shrieks in the somber alleys, it seems like desecration. No; one must linger in them at twilight, when all is still, or visit them on a winter’s afternoon while the mists flit about their paths and groves like the ghosts of past joys. These gardens, and many others besides, seem

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like the graves of so many delightful pleasures – dead forever. Today nervous excitement supplants a quiet enjoyment. Le monde se fait vieux, alas! L.L., Naples.

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Louis Lloyd

“Montreal Letter”

From the French of François Coppée The Week 10 November 1887

Oh! if some verse of mine survive by chance, I only hope the humble poem will be Chosen by those who in the volume glance That I have written, darling, but for thee. Louis Lloyd, Montreal

Montreal Letter The Week 9 February 1888

Last Monday evening a small but respectable audience assembled in an upper chamber to witness the manoeuvres of the Archbishop’s Guard. It is composed of sturdy young French Canadians, who in tight white breeches, long boots, short black coats, and kepi, looked very picturesque and handsome, if not very formidable. The most interesting work they did was when under the command of Professor Legault – a maitre d’armes, I believe, second to none in Canada, – the Guard went through the different movements required in fencing, now using the left hand, now the right. As glittering foil-points came perilously close to our noses, surmising what might be the result of a similar proximity under different circumstances was scarcely pleasant. After some preliminary fencing bouts among the men, the great attraction of the evening came forward in the person of Madame Jeanne Camerone, maitresse d’armes Espangole, as she 148 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

styles herself. Such a designation calls up disagreeable visions of female prize fighters, so that it was quite a surprise to find Madame Jeanne a lithe, graceful, modest little creature, clothed in a dress, though short, essentially feminine. During her contest with the Professor she evinced most astounding dexterity. Indeed so easy was each movement, quarte, tierce, octave, etc., so eminently decorous the entire performance, that to any one who is happy enough to be afflicted with a little less than the ordinary share of old fogyism, such an exercise must commend itself as most beneficial to both men and women. According to Mr. Roland, no other is better calculated to develop and cultivate bodily activity; while another writer tells us that “the use of the foil and the broadsword diffuses ease, elegance, and grace all over the body, and imparts to the look and gesture an appearance of intellectual vigour; it teaches invaluable lessons of patience and self-command, and contributes to discipline the temper.” Far away in the dingiest, busiest, smokiest part of the city, where one can feel her great heart throbbing all day long, only perched high above the multitudinous sea, in the brightest corner of a rambling attic, is the studio of an artist, an artist in the truest sense of the word – William Brymner. This pretty, quaint little nook, standing amidst a hideous mass of public offices, with the seething waves of sordid life beating about, shines as it were, “a good deed in a naughty world.” The poor, smutty inhabitants of the attic look up like surprised cattle as we pass the open doors of their tiny rooms. Our artist’s studio stands at the farther end of the gaunt apartment, and is partitioned off from the rest. There are studios and studios: workshops where the most attractive objects are the painter’s works, A Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood 149

curiosity shops to which every country “from China to Peru” has contributed something, so that we wonder whether after all we are not merely in a modern drawing-room. Mr. Brymner belongs to the first class, but I assure you, so thoroughly is our attention occupied, so pleasantly are our senses flattered by his pictures that we have no time to deplore the absence of exotic treasures. Mr. Brymner studied in the French school, and every inch of his work betrays it. We find here a counterpart of the very latest expression of Parisian art, that art which joins with the life and unconventionality of the “Impressionists” the sobriety of an older school. It is very curious and very interesting to mark the result of French ideas sown in an Anglo-Saxon mind. Whereas with the French artist the mere conquering of technical difficulties, the simple expression of new and curious effects, is often in itself an end, with the English one it is more likely to be only a means. Mr. Brymner’s style is French, but he has subtly infused a certain something – soul – into his work that the artists with whom he would be ranked with [sic] in France not seldom lack. However, I am sure this “manner” is more suitable than any other for the picturing of Nature as she appears to us. The great charm of our scenery is its unconventionality and the most living French art is unconventional. It has taught us to find interest, nay, and even beauty in the roughest scene, the homeliest figure. To treat our wild, wayward country according to the dictates of the English school would be certain death. Ours is not a landscape of great trees, as tufted and prim as funeral plumes; embryo rivers, and velvety fields; but of unfinished aspect, akin to what one finds in a country lad, to whose delineation must be brought quite a peculiar talent. 150 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

In “The Swing,” perhaps the best of the work Mr. Brymner showed us, is a group of delightfully natural youngsters, two looking on, two “high in the air,” and one pushing the swing. As you see, the subject is simple enough, yet I assure you the bedizined mannikins of many a conventional canvas have not for us half the interest that is in these childish figures. Very delicate and poetical appears a bit of road near the forest of Fontainebleau. On one hand are some feathery trees, and across the deep rutted way fall the sunshine and shadow of early spring. Mr. Brymner is very fond of painting the light that floods through a window into a room. It is real light, you know. He has such a picture in the gallery at Ottawa, but I prefer the “Old Woman at a Loom,” in his studio. We now come to some Canadian scenes, one of which is peculiarly admirable. In the foreground stands a half-mown cornfield, with sheaves here; then a great golden wave breaking against purple highlands. If you have not the good fortune to see this particular piece of Mr. Brymner’s work, you will doubtless meet other pictures of his, and then you will readily realize what I have tried to show. The time has come for this Canada of ours to be revealed by other tongues, other pens, and in other language than that of the railway magnate or emigration agent. Schemes for the city’s improvement rain on us thick and fast. Those for enlarging the parks and widening the streets are of course admirable. The same, unfortunately, cannot be said about the wretched proposal to erect an elevated railway along one of our principal streets. Pleasant news comes to us from France. Monsieur Fréchette’s poem, La Legende d’un Peuple, meets with ever-increasing success. Not A Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood 151

long ago Monsieur Francisque Sarcey, one of the first critics in Paris, lectured on it, and the leading papers contain critiques of it. Finally, the Academy of Rouen, the second in France, devoted two of its meetings to the study of this Canadian work. It is when we are pronounced “poet” by an Old World tribunal that we are really worthy to bear the name. Louis Lloyd

From New York The Week 3 May 1888

Far enough from Fifth Avenue to excite no emulation among the street cleaners, therefore flanked on either side by hideous dust-bins, is East Fortyfourth Street in the vicinity of the elevated railway. A more begrimed, forbidding locality one would scarcely care to see. Here, on the second floor of a terrace house, I was received by Mrs. Lillie Devereux Blake. Her greeting, if not personally, was certainly nationally characteristic – “Of course, I am always very busy.” Mrs. Blake, it appears, has sacrificed much for that in which most American women, unoccupied with the embroidering of altar-cloths and stitching of pinafores, feel a greater or less interest. Even though at heart you should think as those renegade Congressmen, whose aspen variableness is proverbial when women’s rights are concerned, surely must some honest admiration be given this woman for her persevering bravery. Public opinion one finds difficult enough to combat; but to fight it, weakened by private opposition, needs an amount of stout-heartedness

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and patience, in themselves the strongest argument favouring Mrs. Blake’s schemes. The little drawing room where I sat would have filled a fashionable lady authoress with dismay. There were neither fans nor bits of silk about, and the well-used books stood looking peacefully out at us from homely shelves, infinitely more dignified, it struck me, than their unfortunate, freshlydressed brothers, who furtively peep like lackeys round the corners of the flimsy curtains with which modern taste attempts to hide them. Apart from some family portraits, nothing in the room attracted particular attention until Mrs. Blake entered. Between women who work and those who talk, have you ever noticed how much more time the former hold, despite their incessant labour, for all sorts of outside helpfulness? These invariably come towards one with a sharp interrogation, that they answer ere long themselves by introductions, suggestions, gushing society dames would never dream of. Mrs. Blake is still young, though her gray-black hair and nervous, pre-occupied air seem to contradict it. She leads the Women Suffragists in New York, lectures, and agitates generally. Even now a tour is planned, when she will speak throughout some Western States. With the convention at Washington, Mrs. Blake was delighted. Of course, nothing can be easier than to laugh at these meetings, and yet when you find one of the most prominent figures in them – a figure well-known and highly esteemed by numbers of literati – devoting her life to the end for which they are held, now in rousing the chronically sleepy senatorial conscience, now in working amidst distracting New York hubbub, your hilarity becomes modified; nay, you may even be just enough to take up Mr. George Pellow’s recently

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published Woman and the Commonwealth: or a Question of Expediency. Nothing can exceed the old-fogyism inspiring American opinions on artistic matters. Critics gnash their teeth over the faintest manifestation of unconventionality, and set to work with a brutality only equaled by their ignorance to belabour the unfortunate who shall dare to look at nature without the aid of his grandfather’s coloured spectacles. Nothing is more charming in the Exhibition of the Society of American artists than Mr. Frank W. Benson’s “In Summer.” Shaded from the noonday sunlight that quivers beyond on the gray-green lawn and the beds of flowers, and fills the air with warmth, sits a fair-complexioned, golden-haired, white-robed creature, holding a dainty volume in her lap. A bit of blue sky is visible, and the shawl hanging on the back of the chair recalls the same tone. As the present exhibition owes no allegiance to either press-men or academicians, this exquisite thing enjoys a very prominent position on the line. I had occasion to visit Mr. Benson’s studio in Boston the other day. His confrère, Mr. Edmund C. Tarbell, received us. “In Summer” they had idiotically criticised when exhibited before being sent to New York; all the delicious simplicity they imagined the artist had obtained with little labour or care. “Of course Benson felt rather cut up about it, for, you see, through the whole summer, as long as he could possibly paint out of doors, he worked on the picture.” Verily Mr. Benson shall have his reward, in spite of a Bostonian verdict. You don’t come across such an artistic conscience every day.…

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“First nights” with New Yorkers excite none of the enthusiasm and expectation they do with people who look upon the theatre as something above a place of mere amusement. Strong was the German and Italian element at the initial performance of Verdi’s Otello; pleasantly strong when you were not in the very midst of the poor devils who had paid their dollar and a half to perch among the “gods.” All those nervous little exclamations, those ill-suppressed bravissimos, your phlegmatic nature used to rail at in continental towns you now hail with satisfaction after the soulless comments of unresponsive, self-constituted American critics. Some said Otello “out-Wagnered Wagner.” Not at all. Though Verdi has kept abreast of modern ideas, Otello has grown and ripened under Italian sunshine. If there are no melodies in it at which a so-called music-loving public can spring, still are science and romance very closely allied throughout the opera. Life human, present, is what our art depicts today, and painters in sound as well as in colour would show us work not so much satisfying in itself, as containing a faithful picture of live sunlight, of real rain. Otello the opera, with its clever orchestration, is a painting which must be to us good in proportion to the degree of faithfulness it exhibits in depicting Othello the play. Verdi seems the illustrator of Shakespeare. To say with any authority how far he has succeeded, one must have heard the work many times. Louis Lloyd

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Anacreontic The Week 4 October 1888

I may have told you once, “Her eyes are gray, And round her lips the smiles like sunbeams play” – But if you asked me now, I could not say. I may have told you once in some mad freak, “My love is false and fickle, she will seek Erelong another love as false and weak.” But if you asked me now what faults I see, What virtues, I should tell you laughingly – “Why, friend, she is my love, she loveth me!” Louis Lloyd.

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“Around the World by Ourselves”: “Louis Lloyd’s Letters” “O n

the

‘C ipiar’”

Louis Lloyd’s Letters The Week 11 October 1888

Unless you have had the opportunity of becoming rather satiated with French gardens and English parks, the stumps and leafless trees will begin to pall upon you ere reaching Winnipeg from the East.… But in front rush four colonists’ cars.... Picture some London Alley on wheels, rattling, jolting, made hideous by that grumbling, scolding, squalling, indigenous to the British Isles. It was very funny to find how these sons of, I fear, often far less noble parentage than the soil, demanded separate cars, and that very strict differences should be made where Providence had quite forgotten them. “We ain’t goin’ to be put with them furriners, not we. Ugh! (Nudging my elbow suggestively) to goa near the door of that there furrin car is quite enough.” As a matter of fact, the much despised “furriners” proved the most interesting, the most polite, naturally, the most cheery travellers aboard the train.… The first persons I spoke to came from Nantes, France.… I had some fussy, fuming, complaining English dames to thank for my pleasant conversation with the Frenchmen. An officious old woman wondered at a very high pitch whether “that lady could do somewhat to make them French keep to their side o’ the car.… I wish y’d speak to their children, too, ma’am, they’re just awful,” and so on and so forth.… Instead, A Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood 157

however, I asked questions about “the prospects” … and we chatted away, they with beaming countenance, with enthusiasm, with hope. The men’s clean dark blouses and intelligent faces promised much. These colonists were perhaps the most encouraging specimens I saw.… With the Frenchman’s “knack of hoping,” his frugality, his perseverance, it must strike us as very extraordinary that he does not succeed more brilliantly when transplanted to foreign parts. Would the French of emancipated ideas concerning what is due to that cross-crowned edifice yonder, climb higher? From the Germans themselves I could only ascertain that they were all farmers, bound for the immigrants’ Mecca, Winnipeg , which city, I was finally led to infer, expressed to them the whole North-West territory. In Winnipeg itself I learnt these solid, bovine, patient, hard-working Teutons as colonists surpassed every other nation.… Having gleaned all I could among the colonists, there was nothing to be done but to return to the contemplation of the stumps and charred woods without, or that of the enviable occupants of the parlour-car within. At Sevanne, however, some eighteen hours from Winnipeg, the profound monotony was broken by a troop of Indians, squaws and children, standing there like cattle, dark, strange, picturesque in the red sun-light. They looked at us with an amused, not to say sarcastic air, peculiarly irritating. The laugh was turned on them, however, when a facetious cowboy close by suggested the possibility that the pantaloons of the younger members of the tribe had been taken in weekly numbers of which the series was very far from being complete.… [O]ur stay in Winnipeg proved as delightful as all sorts of unexpected hospitality, the study of 158 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

curiously developed character, and glimpses of an unconventionality ye wot not of, could make it. I don’t think we half realize how strong a factor in the people’s future education will prove the plan on which their city is built. What else can they breed, those little, huddled-up European towns, but intrigue and murder and all crimes that hate the sun? … Whether Winnipeggians understood this theory when they laid out their Main Street, their wide thoroughfares generally, I cannot say, but it is very certain their social life has something of prairie freedom and latitude which at once dispenses with much clandestine maneuvering, and widens the path of salvation to an encouraging degree. One can’t help being favourably impressed by a place whose cabs are as delightfully comfortable as gondolas, whose highways are paved with cedar blocks, where even the poaching cow on your future host’s front block looks a welcome ten times more warming than the mincing reception of the dames “down east.” Louise Michel herself could scarcely hope to realize republican dreams after the fashion Winnipeggians seem already to have realized them. Few barbed fences insist doggedly upon your neighbor’s rights; indeed he shows at times an almost self-destructive generosity with regard to his ox, his maid-servant, and in fact, all that is his. Our first glimpse of society was afforded us at a charmingly convivial little dinner given by what, I suppose, are the most genuine specimens of N. W. knights. Comfort ye, comfort ye, mothers and sisters who have vague fears concerning the temporal welfare of your idols! Spacious, polished, rug-covered hall, and drawing room none the less cozy for being deprived of feminine gew-gaws; a board all a-sparkle, and heavy laden A Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood 159

with succulent viands; the usual fussily dressed Hebe replaced by a golden-headed Mercury – you will admit the life of our four enviable hosts has nothing to fear from comparison.… Nothing can give you a better idea of how completely passed the boom period is St. Boniface, which looks sleepily at Winnipeg from across the river, than the fact that a sixteen thousand dollar shop sold the other day for a thousand. The imposing stone church and the still more imposing convents – there are two – seem, nevertheless, flourishing. Louis Riel, you know, lies buried here. His name and nothing else is on the wooden cross that stands with flowers about its foot and a wooden fence around. Under the protecting shadow of the sacred edifice, watched by those pathetic-faced red and purple blossoms which look up craving pardon from the veriest miscreant’s grave, for the moment the pretty, melancholy spot quite fails to remind us that beyond, beyond on the Hudson Flats across the bridge, Scott was murdered.... Louis Lloyd, Regina.

Louis Lloyd’s Letter The Week 18 October 1888

Notwithstanding the maternal argument that “they was babies too, so they needn’t shun the car, as if the children had the plague,” existence anywhere else except on the platform during our journey from Winnipeg to Moosomin was made unbearable by a contingent of infants. I never could understand why the small child and its guardian were not relegated to some nursery car. The orange and biscuit make havoc of the beautiful blue plush seats, and incautious little feet climb 160 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

with disastrous effect over valise and shawls. But the worst has not come until the big-eyed travelling infant has conceived in its innocent brain the unhappy idea of staring at you. Then sleeping, writing or eating is as unquestioningly an impossibility as painting outside under the riveting gaze of a cow. … Beyond Brandon, past miles of prairie, and where the lonely little stations and houses make one cry for very sympathy, past an indefinite number of Ogilvie’s monster grain elevators, we found Moosomin. It was quite dark when they dumped us down at a nondescript station, enlivened by the rough-booted, gruff-voiced sensation hunters of the district.… As for any priority among Moosomin inns, the inhabitants will all tell you – “They’re just most one’s as good as the other.” We put up at “the other” .… The space in our private apartments not occupied by the bed and the washstand is scarcely worth mentioning. But for all this we were not unhappy – you never need be if your digestion will permit you to look upon everything in the light of “an experience.” … As long as we have our prairies, we need never grudge the Frenchman his gardens or the Englishman his parks. It was perfectly intoxicating to drive across that glorious rolling country, in a keen wind, behind two hot-blooded bronchos, across the soft, multi-coloured ground, through the long grass, up and over the farm-dotted bluffs, and away and away under an immeasurable canopy of swirling clouds. We could see whole cities outlined against the sky – towers and minarets in oriental profusion and delicate splendour – pinecities they were, yet the illusion was complete. I should have been content to forget everything, A Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood 161

everything but the free, wild passionate deeptoned earth and heaven; to drink long draughts of the air that tasted like strange wine, till every vein throbbed again with a newly-found freedom. The object we had in view, however, was of quite a different nature. If noisome weeds could shoot up suddenly from a heather wilderness, it would give you an idea of how some of the Baroness BurdettCoutts’ East-end Londoners appear, planted on our prairies. Fancy effete cockneyism with its hand guiding a Western plough! Fancy a breath from Seven Dials blown through your flower garden! But of course all of the twenty families that were quartered upon us four years ago have not proved equally misplaced. So far, twelve have been successful farmers – successful, that is, for East-end Londoners.… In my next I hope to give some account of the ideal farmer – the Scotchman from Ontario, whose horizon is bounded by his acres, and whose wife has that cool, fresh, heartlessly healthy look about her that only a life-long intimacy with butter and eggs can produce.

Louis Lloyd’s Letters The Week 25 October 1888

… Regina and the surrounding country are peculiarly adapted to the ethnologist. Crofters, Germans, Russians, Alsatians, and that genius popularly known as “the younger son,” have all settled somewhere about. There are Canadians also, Canadians who show you of what marvels the land is really capable.… There are two farms near Regina, which, I suppose, may be counted among the finest in the Northwest. One belongs to an Ontario man, the other to an Englishman, and we found just that 162 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

difference between them discernible between the work of a professional and an amateur. In the first case, from parlour to dairy, from the uttermost verge of 1280 acres to the doorstep everything bespoke the farm. We entered a substantial, practical house, whose snowy floors were covered with “rag” carpets, and whose browned, blooming, vigorous master and mistress suggested nothing but marvelous crops, sunny butter, home-made bread and rare jam. They had no need to attempt to reconcile past finery with their present existence painfully au naturel. You were not asked to five o’clock tea, but you were invited to inspect the dairy, a dairy where the milk of twelve cows was kept and the butter therefrom. For this butter a very ready market could always be found in Regina.… Our Ontario friends, you see, and people like them are really those wanted in the Northwest. The English farm was quaintly pretty with its sweet, faint smelling front garden, too quaint, too pretty “for the like of us Nor’ Westers.” When you transfer the contents of a Bayswater drawing-room to a Canadian farm house one or the other must suffer. There were dainty conceits in furniture and ornaments, and the refreshments so hospitably offered us were found delicious; but nobody could ever imagine our hostess at the churn; and her daughter, fresh-cheeked though she was, appeared too charming in shooting gear to follow the avocation of a raw-handed milk-maid. Thus we learned with no surprise that the London gentleman had spent more money than his neighbor from Ontario, but that he owned less land and made smaller profits.… Mr. James’ five acre vegetable garden on the outskirts of Regina is only another proof of the prairie’s limitless capabilities. Its produce has A Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood 163

taken first prizes every where.… But despite all this Mr. James intends selling out.… Returning from Mr. James’ garden, we came across the German-Russian settlement. It is a cluster of one-room huts, half in the ground, and half out, looking like the remains of some mound city. These Russian-Germans from Odessa are beamingly dirty. The woman whom I addressed could speak no English, but her German was very fair. She had round, twinkling, intelligent blue eyes, ruddy cheeks, and dark wavy hair. The pleasant creature told me there were in all twenty families. They first had heard of a promised land beyond the seas, and came out unassisted two years ago. Then they sent for their friends. All appeared eminently contented.… Not one word of complaint escaped the energetic little frau’s lips as she knitted away while talking to us, notwithstanding the fact that the most destitute east-end Londoner would scorn to set foot in her rat-hole house.… And now I would tell you of the last settlement we visited, a unique, extremely interesting one – I mean the barracks of the Mounted Police. They form quite a little wooden village two miles from Regina. Whatever you may think of this force down east, of its importance and its work, I can only speak as an impartial observer must who has visited headquarters and taken the trouble to acquire absolute proofs of its unquestionable usefulness in the past and in the present.… Think a moment of the horrid botch they made of matters in the Western states. There civilization tried to take root on volcanic ground.… White people squatted down in a happy-go-lucky fashion, with no guarantee of peace from the Indians, with no force at work to control, not so much by fire as by friendliness. Could one be surprised then at a Custer massacre? … 164 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

Before leaving Regina let me introduce you to the genial guide of our wanderings whom you know by name and reputation if you have not the pleasure of a personal acquaintanceship – Mr. Nicholas Flood Davin. He is seated in his little study at The Leader office, as complete an editorial study as one could find, with its French, German, Greek, Latin, and English books. The Hon. Member for Western Assiniboia has been welcomed wherever he has conducted us. Even an old German frau told me confidently that Herr Davin ist ein sehr schöner herr, (Mr. Davin is a very worthy gentleman).… But we were perhaps more grateful to Mr. Davin for introducing us to “Elaine” than for introducing us to any other fact connected with Regina. “Elaine’s” real name I am not yet at liberty to disclose, only as she appeared in our eye a very poetical fact, as a poetical fact I would speak of her till she shall speak for herself. Mr. Davin read us some pretty bits of pathetic verse, some charmingly humorous rhymes, and a quaint prairie sketch; we were therefore quite prepared to find a very literary lady indeed when we accepted her hospitable invitation to dine in the evening. We found a literary lady, but I hardly know which I enjoyed most, her coffee or her conversation; which I most admired, her verses or the coquettish way she had transmogrified her log cabin. That men should be their own doctors and joiners is comprehensible, but have we not treble reason to call this the land of promise where a lady can compose a distich with as much facility as she can a pudding; where carpentering and cantos go hand in hand. Louis Lloyd

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Louis Lloyd’s Letter The Week 14 December 1888

Our train had just left Medicine Hat, … one of those bony little villages which lie here and there, like mammoth skeletons, on the gaunt prairie, … when Garth Grafton came up hurriedly, excitedly, with that peculiarly feminine interrogatory exclamation: “Do you know, do you know, my dear, who the tall, gray-haired man is to whom I’ve been speaking?” I confessed my ignorance. “That man is Charles Dudley Warner!” “Charles Dudley who?” “Charles Dudley Warner.” “Well, think of it, just think of it: the author of the delicious My Summer in a Garden and Backlog Studies, and – and – Oh! You must know. Well, I was standing on the platform, and the Assistant General Manager came up and asked us into his private car. Mr. Warner was there, and repeated the invitation, so we’re going.” I was suddenly filled with a sickening sense of fear, of almost nameless dread. I don’t suppose I shall ever experience such feelings again till the trumpet sounds, or till I meet another real, live author of whose works, nay, of whose very existence, I am in total ignorance. “Not know Warner!” continued Garth, aghast. “Not know Warner! Why, you might just as well say you don’t know Longfellow, or Emerson, or – anybody. Have you heard of Lowell? Have you heard of Whittier? Perhaps you would like me to tell you who Mark Twain is! Not heard of Charles Dudley Warner! and I’ve been saying we are his most ardent admirers. Well, I don’t care; I am,

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at any rate, so you must just get out the best way you can.” Garth is a Canadian doublée d’une Americaine.… Garth knows lots of American littérateurs more or less personally. I don’t think I ever spoke to a genuine author in my life; I mean one who has had his things printed without paying for it. You can understand the situation; you can understand how an unsophisticated young journalist should long with a prodigious longing to be “noticed” in high places, and how, under the circumstances I should feel faint at the thought of such notice.… I knew how the whole thing must turn out. We should enter, and get luxuriously seated, and have miles of prairie to look at, and then – then Garth would talk Washington and New Orleans. Garth Always talks Washington and New Orleans when she can; it is her fox’s platter.… We entered the cozy little drawing room at the back of the car. Mr. Warner was there. On looking at him again, on examining him closely – I had not examined him before – an indescribably re-assuring sensation came over me. I was certain a man who looked like that would be merciful. It is a test, a very sharp test, to hear your works are utterly unknown by someone, but somehow I don’t think a genuine author minds it. Then when Mr. Warner smiled, his smile corresponded to the one Artemus Ward talks about. It began at the heart and worked upwards. Mr. Warner began speaking to both of us. You understand I was alone on one side of the car, and – and – No, Garth didn’t start Washington, but she started something far worse – Commercial Union. At any rate, what with the noise of the train and the choice of subjects, I found myself out of the discussion. There remained an A Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood 167

alternative between Robert Elsmere and the prairie – I chose the prairie. Our interviews à trois usually pass this way. Garth having been some years on American newspapers, always distances me, so that if I want anything particularly good I must simply trade some surreptitiously gained bit of information.… Garth tells me that Mr. Warner said, among other things, that Canadians were quite as democratic as the Americans, and that the Canadian type had yet to be developed.… As I sat there contemplating the prairie an Englishman turned up, an English writer who turned out very interesting in his way.… [He] went on to talk about literature. He knew Mrs. Humphrey Ward; he knew who the original was in almost every character in Robert Elsmere, and he could claim the right of bemoaning Matthew Arnold’s death as if he had been a brother. I enjoyed him too when he ascribed, as one of his chief reasons for disliking American literature, its orthographical errors – the most distressing of which seemed to be the neighbour with a u (I wondered if Mr. Warner spelt neighbour with a u).… Then came some remarks about Mr. Goldwyn Smith, full of insight and appreciation, and sensibility. Altogether the English writer was extremely entertaining with his delicately spiced literary talk and the graceful manners he had been far-seeing enough not to leave behind him. We dropped the private car at sundown and didn’t see its occupants again till we reached Vancouver. And now you are going to be very much shocked, if not pityingly amused, at my first – indeed at my impressions of the Rockies throughout. When I awoke and found myself surrounded by all that austere, cold, awful magnificence utterly free from any memory, I felt as if I had been suddenly transported into a scarcely 168 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

finished Fifth Avenue palace. The uninhabited chambers, the unfurnished halls of the marvelous structure seemed fresh from the hands of the master builder, but anything fresh from the hands of the master builder very few of us, unfortunately, can appreciate. Let the architecture be never so perfect, we must have the bric-à-brac of quaint conceits and delicate similes, the softly burning memories lightening dim alcoves – a poet host to meet us on the threshold. It was Switzerland without her history, her guidebooks, her quaint villages, her Byron and Rousseau; everything, in fact, that goes to make the sauce piquante which the ordinary palate finds it absolutely necessary that all scenery should have. At present, therefore, the Rockies leave me cold, as the French say; nor do I think they are likely to leave the every day traveller in any other condition until we can find the names of Canadian heroes engraven on their pines, until poet and painter shall have interpreted them to us. But notwithstanding all this, the Banff Hotel and Glacier House insure [sic] an ever increasing influx of Americans; patriotic zeal must tempt crowds of Canadians thither; while we may be certain the British will patronize these mountains as long as there remains a height unscaled or a caribou. And now, not being a Shelley, I would say no more about the Rockies. I know it is very unsatisfactory to dismiss them after this fashion, but I stand before such icy, incomprehensible beauty just like the poor little French soldier stood before the Venus of Milo. At Field we took the first steps towards riding on the pilot, by riding in the engine room and making friends with the chief engineer.… I regret to say that notwithstanding my having made friends with the engineer, A Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood 169

notwithstanding his courteous permission, I did not ride on the pilot after all; please believe it wasn’t fear that deterred me, it was – well, no matter, as long as you will believe I wasn’t afraid.…1 After a morning spent in acute agony while travelling over the blood-curdling track the train follows at a dizzy height above the Fraser River, we reached Vancouver in an exceptionally grateful frame of mind. We did not see Mr. Warner there till some days later, but I should like to tell you about our last talk with him before I begin to describe this place. Mr. Warner spent eight hours in Vancouver and then went on to Victoria. We were very kindly invited to join “the party,” which invitation we accepted. You can picture the hero of the expedition standing on the deck of the Yose-Mite, as the eastern magnate called it – you can picture a tall, erect figure with grey beard and aquiline nose, pale cheeks and longish grey hair, and eyes – I don’t think I had better try to describe the eyes. I have attempted it several times and Garth always says: “That’s not a bit like them.” The fact is, I have never seen anything like them, I have never seen eyes at once so clever and so honest, eyes that had examined and understood so much, and that yet were never tired of watching every object, every expression which passed. Mr. Warner didn’t seem pitched in a different way from those about him, his life-symphony was only being played several octaves higher than that of ordinary people. We sat on the deck of the Yosemite as it flitted over the twilit waters – smooth, mist-haunted waters, where the islands floated torpidly like lazy sea-monsters, and listened to him talk, listened to his endless reminiscences of literary folk – not once did he allude to himself or to his own works; how I appreciated this reticence! His criticisms were fair 170 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

and delightfully impersonal, quite unconsciously did he put work to the test his own can bear so well, trying it on the touchstone of veracity and simplicity. Among modern European novelists he seemed to like Turgenef immensely. The combination of truth and art in this Russian writer could not do otherwise than please him. I should enjoy exceedingly telling you all I can remember of the quaint, droll, dainty things Mr. Warner said on that, to us, memorable trip to Victoria, but I am not a reporter you know.… And now I want you to catch a glimpse of Mr. Warner as I saw him last at the Hotel Vancouver. Everybody was bustling about, and the porter was crying, “All aboard for the east-going train.” Indeed, I don’t know exactly what I was doing at all in the entrance, but that – well, Mr. Warner came up to say “good-bye.” He didn’t say only “good-bye,” he said some other things I shall always remember and try to follow out. He told me above all things to be true and simple: to observe every detail with infinite care; to avoid “apt quotations” for they are lazy and slipshod. Then he wished me success – There was a rush, a rumbling of wheels, and he was gone. Louis Lloyd.

Louis Lloyd’s Letter The Week 28 December 1888

Perhaps no better proof could be given of the charm Vancouver has had for us than the fact that it is only now, at the eleventh hour after a threeweeks’ stay here, that I begin to indite my fourth budget. We have walked and we have driven; we have grown enthusiastic, and our enthusiasm has A Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood 171

become a flame lighting up the city’s future, a future of crowded thoroughfares and towering buildings, of hive-like wharves and rattling stations. Between Vancouver and the prairie towns there is all the difference which lies between a body of flesh and blood and a body of stone. Places like Regina will go on increasing, but it must always be mechanical work. I have yet to discover what irresistible incentive to live people can find in such flat, treeless, waterless spots. Here everything is instinct with vitality. The mists that coil about the mountain sides and stroke their heads like nymphs coquetting with a band of Titans, change a thousand times a day. Then the warm, damp air coaxes from nature all her passionate luxuriance, and from men an ardour far keener than they feel in Arctic regions. The first thing to be done upon arrival in Vancouver is to go and see the park. The first thing to be done on arrival in any new place is to go and see every interesting point for twenty miles round, and then return under the hallucination that you have been looking at the place itself. Vancouver today stands filled with stumps and possibilities – but little else. The city begins very piano towards the east in low, cramped-up wooden houses, and then goes on crescendo westwards from two-storied buildings to those of six. I need hardly mention, I suppose, the buildings of six are the hotel. Further than this you may find cosy dwellings standing amidst a harvest of stumps; but the stump’s hour has come. As I look from my window out through the night, I can see a perfect pandemonium stretching to the water. Trees seem such humble things. They are pathetic, raising their bare blackened arms in helpless agony towards the sky, while the crawling flames encircle them and slowly suck away their life-blood. 172 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

Oh, you poor martyrs to civilization! But what would be done without town lots to sell? Talking about town lots, let us take the road to the park which passes along Granville Street. It is a little out of the way, but never mind. A little out of the way to the park, I mean, but out of the way of nothing else. This future thoroughfare stretches from bay to bay right across the town. At present at one end are the C. P. R. workshops, and the bridge across False Creek to the farming country; at the other the railway station and harbour. Time may change the position of things more or less but time cannot possibly change all the importance of Granville Street. On it now stands the Hotel Vancouver, on it eventually we shall find the opera house. All day long one may hear from the hotel windows the whiz, the thud, the creaking of machinery, and chisel, and hammer, and this means wonderful new buildings for Granville Street. Nobody wants a boom, and the powers that be don’t expect one though the value of property increases steadily day by day. When we remember what constituted Vancouver two years ago after the fire – one house was it? we do anything but despair at seeing tall trees growing on town lots for sale. Such a place is simply irrepressible. And passing the town lots we come to the park. I wish Garth were not sitting in front of us in this little buggy. I wish I could drive through these seven miles of soft, green, scented wilderness without any other thought except the softness and greenness, and the perfume, but Garth is inexorable. You must learn all about the back country and the price of land, the area of the park, and the circumference of the trees. So know then that Vancouver has a very promising back country, farming land not too extensive at present but A Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood 173

growing rapidly, and extremely rich. Know also that this seven-mile park through which we are driving was begun only a short time ago, and that where the carriage rolls today over a shell road as on velvet, was tree-covered in January last! Now let me tell you the circumference of some of the trees and we shall be able to enjoy their beauty peacefully, artistically. They vary from 34 feet to 57 feet, according to the nationality of the measurer. But I like it not, this talk of circumferences in fairyland. Why, it is almost as bad as placing pigmy philistines beside the forest giants we wish to photograph! As the park lies at present you can imagine nothing more delicious than its green entanglements, where the delicate undergrowth, the slender trees, and shrubs, and plants cling to each other, and intertwine with almost delirious passion, while from great boughs above hang like disheveled hair masses of grayish moss. Apart from a few Chinese huts at the beginning of the park, and some Indian ones further on, no trace of humanity besides a “Lovers’ Walk” is to be found anywhere within these enticing precincts. The over-ambitious citizen hints at play-grounds and “tidying-up,” but we can only hope that here, at least, progress, satisfied with her stupendous success everywhere else, will lay down her axe and not try to improve what seems now a park lovelier perhaps than any other in Canada. We drive along where trees form solemn guards of honour on either side, and every now and then catch glimpses of the sea, of dreaming high-land, of trailing mists and delicate-tinted skies, skies and mists eastern folk could never imagine. It is a new heaven and a new earth. We were standing in the large entrance hall of the Hotel Vancouver. A very decided, very much 174 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

travelled feminine member of Canadian high life had just emerged from the dining-room. “I tell you,” said this lady, “I tell you it is the most comfortable hotel I have ever been in, and I’ve been in a good many.” This was agreeable news truly after Moosomin experiences which only one night at the Glacier proved all too short to obliterate. We entered the dining-room, and over Epigramme de Mouton, Côtelettes d’Ours à la Bernoise and similar succulent viands quite corroborated the discerning dame’s verdict. But what interested us to an even greater extent than Côtelettes d’Ours were the people from all parts of the globe that filled the tables – unshaven British aristocrats, brush-headed Germans, nondescript Canadians, and daintilydressed Frenchmen. At dinner, however, the scene was less interesting, less characteristic, than at luncheon the following day. It is true the Britisher made almost as little toilette for the former as for the latter, but still a rough and ready respect was paid to our civilization at the evening meal which he thought quite superfluous when partaking of the mid-day repast. Indeed, seeing English noblemen aping in foreign countries the airs and dress of jockeys; shock-headed younger sons whose apparent ignorance of the razor gives them a most unmistakable resemblance to Arthurian Knights; the adaptability of British manners generally to navvy etiquette, one is inclined to sigh over the invariably disastrous influence of foreign climate upon English deportment. Those “institutions” once regarded with supreme disgust as essentially Yankee, are now used by British gentlemen after the unblushing fashion of New York street arabs; and the little green glasses filled with Japanese manufactured tooth-picks (which, by the way, Hotel Vancouver never placed on any of its tables, A Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood 175

but only at the dining-room door for the benefit of its English patrons) they use on all conceivable occasions, characteristically disregardful of their neighbors’ sensibilities. On the other hand the French gentleman from Paris finds no necessity for changing his rôle once in Vancouver. Messieurs Pinson, Moineau, and Hirondelle (I need hardly say these names are fictitious, though the individuals are real) were the most interesting figures we had met since Mr. Charles Dudley Warner. It was strange away off there, while sauntering over the softly carpeted upper hall of the hotel, cleverly designed to form a very pleasant afterdinner promenade, to hear bits of Chopin and Carmen, echoes from Parisian salons. I entered the drawing room and found Monsieur Hirondelle working off on a mellowtoned grand piano the rather overpowering effects of his day’s transactions. For these Frenchmen had hardly taken up a temporary residence in Vancouver with any intent to idle. Vancouver can certainly not be for many years yet the flaneur’s haven. No, Monsieur Hirondelle was all aglow at the fact that having deposited only thirty dollars or so on some property he intended buying, he had seized an opportunity of turning it over at an advance of three thousand dollars! The French are particularly partial to coups, and this was decidedly a coup. But despite his success Monsieur Hirondelle felt by no means content to rest here, so that before we left his investments promised quite a gilded future. Nor were Messieurs Moineau and Pinson less enthusiastic. All three had been to Vancouver’s rival Seattle, before these ventures, to see how affairs looked there, but Seattle disgusted them. “Une vraie bourse – a regular stock exchange – the hotel,” they exclaimed, “men asking you to 176 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

invest, discussing, disputing everywhere. We like this place much, much, better, and I think,” continued cautious Monsieur Hirondelle “money invested in Vancouver is as safe as possible. I am going to build on my lots, Pinson is going to build on his, and Moineau already owns several cottages. We return to France propriétaires!” They concluded it was très chic to return to France propriétaires, and seemed quite prepared to tell their compatriots of the superiority of an investment over a placement. For they realized that placement and investment don’t mean exactly the same thing. The manner in which these delicately nurtured Parisians adapted themselves to the exigencies of our Canadian sporting life was almost as interesting as the way they entered into the mysteries “des town lots.” For both sport and business gloves were worn; both sport and business were followed after a dainty drawing-room fashion quite pleasing by contrast. It was a party of seven, duly chaperoned. We had been invited to go on a small steam yacht up to the north arm of the Fraser River, to camp out as best we could for the night, and, rising betimes next morning, slaughter as many ducks as a pleasure expedition can. Garth and I, being novices in the noble art of shooting, were most agreeably excited at the prospect. Like all such novices, Garth’s one aim hitherto had been to kill a bear. Was there any probability that we should find bears about where we intended camping out? No, it was not very probable, though of course a stray one might wend its way thither. Garth seemed momentarily depressed, but immediately reflected that after all a brace of ducks might not be so bad for a beginner, and felt consoled.

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In the evening at half past seven we all collected in the hall of the hotel. Monsieur Hirondelle in English gaiters, his great coat done up à la militaire; Monsieur Moineau in top boots; and Monsieur Pinson, tall and bronzed, the most Nimrod-looking of the three. The number and size of our guns were pleasantly formidable in our eyes, and so was the magnitude of our hamper prepared by the hotel’s incomparable headwaiter. Moonlight nights in Vancouver are a rarity in October, but we had a moonlight night. The little yacht crept out steadily upon the dark water leaving the town crouching behind like a thousand-eyed monster foiled in pursuit. Then we sped away and away till there was nothing but pinecovered land on either side. Monsieur Hirondelle began to sing Massinet [sic], and as the moon coquetted shyly with us over the tops of the highest trees, Monsieur Moineau was reminded of De Musset’s impertinent simile when he likens her serene ladyship rising above a steeple to a dot over an i. Suddenly Monsieur Hirondelle disappeared into the little cabin “Only wait,” said Monsieur Pinson, “Hirondelle is going to begin his sport tonight; darkness makes no difference to him.” After a while something large and dark floated past us, and instantly we heard a bang. “Oh! It’s a bea – ,” but Garth checked herself in time. I betrayed myself by an ignominious shriek – and all for a log of wood. However, the log was struck which was more than could be said for the game next morning – but I anticipate. When we had sailed for about three hours we came to a gently curved bay, a man-forsaken spot, with one small log hut on the bank by the water, high hills in front and forest all about. Here we 178 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

were to spend the night. The situation charmed me. We found the hut solid enough, but its last inmates had left it in a sorry mess. There was, of course, only one large room whose greasy papers and dried leaves shocked our super-sensitive French friends much more I am afraid than they did us. “Nom d’un chien, quelle saleté,” cried Pinson, and he and Moineau went to work immediately with brooms improvised out of branches to make the house as habitable as French fastidiousness could. A great log fire was built in the chimney place, and while his friends toiled, brought water for the coffee, and showed a backwoods-man’s “handiness” generally, amusingly out of keeping with their Parisian accents and exclamations, Hirondelle sat him down before the hearth, a delicious picture of artistic shiftlessness, and endeavoured to reconcile us to our situation if we needed such reconciliation, by talking about simplicity in art! When we had demolished the hamper, and drunk our steaming coffee – I vow no cordon bleu ever made better – Garth and I, bundled up in furs and shawls, retired to our bracken couches. Half an hour later as I looked out sleepily from my dark corner I saw a very picturesque group bending low over the fire – a group one remembers when gorgeous views of inanimate nature have long since faded into mist. There was our grave chaperon, and, behind, our host’s Spanish face. Moineau’s delicate features were half in shadow. The red light played over Hirondelle’s golden hair, and flashed full upon Pinson’s handsome figure. You can imagine how charming an effect they produced, these men in their hunting gear. All night I dreamt we were on the eve of a battle – a battle between the French and Prussians. I A Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood 179

could just spy the enemy, the Prussians, away off. They had web feet and flapping wings, and their brass helmets were continually slipping down over their beaks. Suddenly the bugle sounded and I jumped to my feet – only it wasn’t the bugle, it was the yacht’s whistle. “Laisse moi donc tranquil – let me alone – but eight minutes more,” groaned Moineau, sleepily, from his corner, but Pinson was obdurate, and in a few minutes the three had disappeared to the water’s edge without hardly having said “Good morning.” After a while they returned looking as if they had just emerged from a band-box. Then there were graceful “Good mornings” indeed. “I suppose,” remarked Garth, “they didn’t consider themselves ‘round’ until they had retied their neckties.” To do anything like creditable shooting one should be out at dawn in a small boat. This I say to remind you how futile were any efforts from a steam yacht after sunrise, and to excuse ourselves for only bringing home “un divers” between us. I fired off Monsieur Hirondelle’s Smith and Wesson soon after we had started on the return trip. I can’t say it was “a first taste of blood,” that intoxicated me, and made me wish to try again, though I did wish to try again. The next time I attempted a rifle, I think I should have succeeded better if I had only been able to remain half as tationary [sic] as the duck. Garth aimed ever so much more scientifically than I did; though her bullets would go scudding away to the shore with a pertinacity that made me suspect she still had designs on some unlucky bear. Suddenly there was a “whist.” Then I saw four rifles directed towards a little fluttering thing on the waves. Bang! bang! bang! bang! 180 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

“Oh! They have really killed it,” cried Garth. No, they had not really killed it, but it was maimed, and the yacht went over to where the unhappy thing floated, and – Well, it was only “un divers,” you know. Our sport had certainly not been brilliant, but I hardly expect to make a more pleasant excursion; and please don’t go away with the impression that under favourable circumstances Messieurs Moineau, Pinson, and Hirondelle could not have done more credit to the excellent shooting about Vancouver. For proof to the contrary you might have seen a feathered heap at the hotel entrance on the evening following our famous expedition, that more than redeemed their reputation of the previous day. Louis Lloyd

“J apanese S ketches” Louis Lloyd’s Letter The Week 18 January 1889

And so we had arrived in Japan, in the land of tinted films, and cobweb lines and the quintessence of things. The ship was stormed by scores of curious creatures – men in dark blue tunics, with white cabalistic marks on the back, their brown faces, and chests and limbs glinting like polished bronze; men in tights, who might have been Florentines of the fifteenth century; men in the loose kimono. Strange-looking boats flecked the sea; strange-looking, low-roofed houses made the town by the water’s edge. Away near the horizon A Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood 181

line rose a huge cone-like mass of something white from a dark green basin. Large birds floated, and wheeled and shrieked through the air, and over everything stretched a sky of tender, hazy blue. As I looked at the fantastic picture painted on the gold back-ground of an Eastern morning it all seemed as mad a medley of beauty and grotesqueness as ever artist imagined for a Satsuma vase. They had told us of a land of paper houses and toy gardens, where the fascinating beauties of the tea-chest walked the streets, beauties who could wither with a side glance all our Greek ideals. They had told us, too, how the fashions of Eden were still in vogue there, how everybody was always contented and happy, and how everybody always smiled. But notwithstanding these simple and benign conditions of life, notwithstanding our delight at the new charm of things, our foreign sensibilities would be often shocked, very much shocked indeed. They had insisted upon that. We came to a sleepy, conventional-looking town, whose sober banks and shops, and large, cool houses suggested far more strongly a community favouring five o’clocks, than one that found its satisfaction in contemplatively smoking at noon, and living by the uncertain light of parti-coloured lanterns at midnight.… We had just had time to give ourselves a little land look before going in to tiffin … when we were stopped suddenly by a funny, anxious-looking youth in European dress, but with a very unmistakable crop of straight, thick Japanese hair, and a pair of little questioning Japanese eyes. He poked his card at us and said something about an “interview,” and “reporter,” and “something shimbun.” ...

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We all three entered the drawing-room; we all three smiled; and then we were all three in a nervous uncertainty as to what to do next. “We have come to see your beautiful Japan.” This was clear, concise, politic; Garth said it. “You must excuse that I visit ladies without introduction,” answered the reporter somewhat irrelevantly. He had been waiting to say it for some time, and now that he had said it and was reassured, he looked more as if he meant business. “It is a very long journey from Montreal to Japan,” resumed Garth, wishing to be at once encouraging and suggestive. The reporter evidently thought this fact worthy of remark, for he said, “Hn, hn,” and took out his note-book. “How long?” he asked. “From Montreal to Vancouver the distance 3,000 miles, and from Vancouver – ” “Vancouver, Canada?” queried the reporter. “Yes, and from Vancouver – ” But I saw him put it down as quick as light, “Distance from Montreal to Canada, 3,000 miles.” “My dear,” I murmured to Garth, in a voice that trembled with emotion, “I don’t think the gentleman has quite understood your statement.” “It is 3,000 miles from Montreal to Vancouver,” I added turning to the reporter.… “What is the object of your caravancery?” came next. We both gasped, our smile sputtered into a laugh and then we made frantic efforts to stop. “You – you must think foreigners – very rude,” I stuttered. “Yes,” was the somewhat unexpected reply.

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We should have lost our balance completely had not Garth followed this up with astounding sang froid: “You must not think we are laughing at you,” she said, “we are laughing at – at – an ocean voyage is so apt to make people nervous and silly.” “Yes,” again replied the reporter, frankly. “I speak the English very badly,” he added, with a modesty that appealed to us. Of course, I wished we could speak Japanese one quarter as well, and Garth said, “Yes, indeed”; and the youth said, “Yes.” He had evidently not come to bandy compliments, and he really did wish to know “the object of our caravancery,” so he repeated his query in another form. “What the object of these ladies correspondents’ visit?” It seemed a fair question, and Garth answered it accordingly. “Hearing there was a Paradise beyond the seas,” she began. The reporter said, “Hn, hn,” and went scribbling along. But I think I had better give you some reasons Garth presented for coming to “this enlightened land,” in the language of the youth’s translation of the interview after it had appeared in one of the Japanese newspapers. According to this translation Miss Grafton said that her chief object was “to see the native life of the people, the condition of social life, and to know how goes the American and English civilization upon the dress, eatings and residence of the people; to inspect the fine arts, fine pictures and the education of this land. By publishing the informations of these things, we wish to bring out the photo of this Paradise.” “Hn, hn,” said the reporter; but Garth had no intention of stopping just then; her economic

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spirit was suddenly roused, and she continued – always according to the translation: “The railway between Montreal and Canada has been constructed already, so, in utilizing this railway, and also the convenience of Canadian Pacific steamers, the long chain of the great trade may be hanged out between Montreal and Japan.” Another “Hn, hn,” another painful pause, and then Garth asked whether any other lady correspondents had ever come to Japan. “Yes,” said the youth, “there is come to Japan no other ladies correspondents.” We asked news of the two gentlemen correspondents who had just left. “Mr. Norman has gone to Corea.” “Did you know him?” “Yes – yes, sir, I know Mr. Norman.” “Mr. Carpenter accompanied him?” “Yes, sir – yes – yes, m’am.” “Did Mrs. Carpenter go too?” “Yes, m’am – yes, miss – yes, sir, he has gone with Mr. Carpenter.” “I understand that Mr. Norman has gone, but Mrs. Carpenter, did she go?” “Yes, sir, Mrs. Carpenter, he has gone.” The gender being somewhat of a stumbling block, I changed the subject. “I suppose the Japanese don’t particularly object to foreign ladies coming amongst them?” “Yes.” “Oh! Do they? I thought a great many Japanese were marrying foreigners now. Haven’t several of your officials married American ladies?” “The Japanese gentleman does not marry so much – so many – now.” … The youth reflected a moment and then: A Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood 185

“What is you opinion about that Japan ladies dress in foreign style and have their hairs made in foreign style?” And the translation says I answered: “We have not seen yet these ladies, but I think it is better to dress in native style for them, because they have the native handsome dresses, very much nicer, I suppose.” There was a very long pause, indeed, after this. Our friend had evidently one more important question to ask us; suddenly it came out. “Will you tell to me your age?” We were so surprised that we told him quite simply the truth. “Hn, hn,” and he put it down. When I took his note-book to correct the spelling of our names, I saw, “Two very nice ladies correspondents of noble looking, aged –- .” We took but a hurried ride through the Japanese quarter of Yokohama, for it is not the thing to be “impressed” to any extent with Japanese scenes till you get to Tokyo. Nevertheless, we found it very wonderful, extravagantly picturesque that Japanese quarter in the late afternoon. There were fierce looking storehouses, all painted black and with iron bars; there were dainty, make-believe habitations of paper and wood; there were great, wide streets filled with what seemed a masquerading multitude, and there was always the dreamy blue sky and the lazily flying birds. Louis Lloyd, Tokyo, Japan, Dec. 10, 1888.

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Taro San: Our Official Friend The Week June 7 1889

A Sketch of a Modern Japanese Nothing has helped us more to understand Japan and the Japanese than our acquaintance with Taro San. It has given us the much-desired glimpse of the inner life of the people which no sojourn in a native family would ever have done.… [B]ehind society’s bows and arigatos, which protect its members’ feelings and sentiments from intrusion as gracefully, as artistically, and as effectually as screens or paper walls protect their persons, half unconsciously, half because he could not help it, our official friend has allowed us to see more than once what really interests and pleases the Japanese, and what they say only interests and pleases them; what their ambitions are, and their real attitude towards foreigners. The character and the aims of a typical modern Japanese gentleman we have found in the person of Taro San. Taro San, however, has been by no means an easy subject to study. Even his most intimate foreign friend, the Frenchman who introduced him to us, and who has known him ever since he was a guide, waiting about the hotels in Yokohama, acknowledges, with some irritation, that he puzzles him at times as only a Japanese can. But it is our official friend’s capacity to puzzle, to mystify people every now and again, which makes him most attractive. When we first met Taro San he seemed to us only a nervous creature with a Japanese laugh that shook him all over as if he were sitting on springs. He was at once shy and oddly brusque, though one could see that his shyness and his brusquerie came from a chronic state of A Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood 187

trepidation lest he should transgress some of the laws of the foreign society in which he found himself. Upon further acquaintance, when he was less embarrassed, and when the Frenchman was not near, we discovered that he possessed a cleverness, a receptiveness, a quick appreciation, which would astonish and charm even in a European. Taro San was a person to know. So it came to pass that we invited him and his sister, Miss CherryBlossom, to our Saturday afternoons in our house at Kudau. And he has come not only on Saturday afternoons, but on many other afternoons, to talk and argue about matters Japanese, and to have an occasional friendly chat about his personal affairs. Our official friend has been invaluable. He has told us a great many things, he has shown us a great many places, and, à la Japonaise, he has promised so often to show us others that we are now under the impression that we must have seen them, too. But more than all, he has given us an opportunity of studying Taro San, the Japanese official, with his semi-foreign manners and his semi-foreign education, his self-satisfaction and his self-distrust, his shrewdness and his blindness, his boyishness and his incomprehensible reticence, his illimitable ambitions and his scintillating hopes. What from the conversations we have had with the Frenchman concerning our friend, what from some remarks made to us by the Frenchman’s daughter, with whom Taro San was once in love, what from the gentleman’s own accounts of himself, I have been able to make a rough sketch of a man who, it is very probable, may be thought some day worthy a volume. At sixteen Taro San left school, not from choice but simply because he had his father and sister to support. It is a fortunate thing that laughter and 188 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

playing are not confined to any age in Japan, and that men of thirty can still enjoy the jokes of the conjurers, and a game of battledore and shuttlecock, for there is practically no childhood in the life of the Japanese, no ignorant, thoughtless, boisterous, awkward period of existence. Babies of seven come to serve you in the shops, and the little girls in long dresses and elaborate chignons bow to each other with all the grace and gravity of ladies dancing a minuet. When European boys are still indulging in Scott, the Japanese youth is pondering over John Stuart Mill, and if you ask this prodigy what he wants to be when he grows up, he will very probably answer, “a diplomatist.” I don’t know whether Taro San has found his position a particularly hard one, I don’t think it occurred to him to question it then, but the other day, when a lady enthusiastically said, “It was just lovely, the way the Japanese took care of their forefathers,” he replied that the obligation should soon cease if he had any authority. Knowing that they could call upon their children to support them in their old age encouraged people to marry thoughtlessly, and to live improvidently; while the necessity which young men were under to support, not their parents alone, but very often a family of sisters also, was an inestimable drag upon their own and the nation’s progress. With his aims Taro San saw only one road to follow. He would go to Yokohama, and he would be a guide. As his object was less to facilitate the foreigner’s progress through Japan than to increase his knowledge of the foreigner’s language, and all in furthering his own ends, to fulfil his duty towards his family, a guide seemed the best thing to be. So Taro San left Tokyo, the school where he had worked, and the quiet walks where he had dreamed, his boyish love for sweet O Kiku San, and his A Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood 189

boyish ambition to enter the University, and went to Yokohama to be the foreigner’s servant. What he really thought, and what he really felt, and what his pride suffered, or if it suffered at all, during the time he spent in that vulgar, roistering city, was difficult to see then, and, to a casual observer, it is not easy to discover now. The Frenchman has told us that Taro at that time (and I believe he tacitly thinks him so still) was a spiritless youth in whom all personal dignity and patriotic pride were absolutely wanting. He abandoned his native manners and his native dress. He sought the society of Europeans in preference to that of Japanese, though the former might belong to a much inferior class; he met insults with smiles; and even after the people whom he served had ridiculed both his country and himself over and over again, he remained in their employ. “Why,” continued the Frenchman, “when Taro was foolish enough to fall in love with my daughter, and I told him to his face I would as soon see her marry a Zulu, did he spring at me as I should have done? Did he offer to fight? No, he simple [sic] grinned and said, So desuka, So you say.” But when Taro himself has spoken of those days in Yokohama, I think I have detected a faintly sardonic smile flitting over his face which has set me thinking.2 Unaided by any teacher, Taro succeeded in two years in gaining a very thorough knowledge of English, a fair understanding of French, and a smattering of German. He then looked about for a position more worthy of him than that of a guide to insolent foreigners. He became student interpreter in one of the Japanese consulates in America. His quick perceptions and his admirable preparation from his Yokohama experience made this glimpse of the Western world of infinite benefit to him. He returned with a clear 190 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

comprehension of Western civilization, but he returned too, like many other Japanese, in the most unfortunate ignorance concerning the proper time and places for the introduction of the reforms he found so necessary to the progress of his country. His first step was to start a newspaper. The next step was that taken by the authorities who seized it and put poor Taro San in prison. Now if Taro San had been a European, especially a Frenchman, whom the Japanese, wrongly I think, is said to resemble, so arbitrary a proceeding might have raised seditious feeling in his young breast, but it didn’t. Upon his release, he promptly gave up all idea of newspaper work, settled down into an honest school-master and student of European literature and philosophy, only murmuring every now and again to himself, “Sukoshi mate – Wait a little,” which might be taken as a motto by the whole Japanese nation. Time went on; the authorities forgot all about the ephemeral Shimbun, and marking Taro San’s abilities, gave him a very important and responsible official position. It was at one of our Saturday afternoons. Taro San remained as usual after the others to have a little friendly chat. We had been talking about literature, and I was more than ever surprised at the delicacy of his perception, and his quick appreciation of our remarks. More than ever anxious that one who realizes infinitely better than any European or Japanese we have met what Japan needs should be placed in authority, suddenly Garth said, half in joke, half in earnest: “Do you know, Taro San, I think you would make an excellent diplomatist.” Taro San instantly blushed up to the roots of his shock of black hair. “I should like much to enter the diplomatic career,” he said with boyish frankness. A Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood 191

Now every Japanese is a diplomatist by nature, and if, added to his natural bent, he has received an education in the ways of foreigners and in the ways of the world, there is, or he thinks there is, no other field in Japan besides the diplomatic one in which his talent can be employed as it deserves. It is true that Taro San’s attempts to hoodwink us have often been amusingly naïve, and that he has fibbed in a way which would not have deceived a child; that he has spoken with far too much openness about his intentions and hopes, and has appeared to throw himself into the power of certain people with hazardous imprudence; but beneath it all but we have caught a suggestion of aims, and ambitions, and abilities, that have made us very proud indeed to know our official friend. “Well,” continued Garth, “I tremble for the time when you shall enter the diplomatic career.” Taro San laughed. “Won’t you take your revenge?” she said tentatively. Taro San laughed again. “You will scatter the foreigners to the four winds of heaven after you have got all you want out of them,” I said, smiling. “Come, confess.” “Oh no, no, not at all. You are quite mistaken.” But Taro San still laughed. “You will have no mercy upon the people who come here to play with your women, to ridicule your institutions, to treat your nation as a Japanese joke.” Taro San grew grave. “And when the time comes,” I went on, “you will give such men as your friend the Frenchman the choice between hara kari [sic],3 and a rencontre with His Majesty the Mikado’s Lord High Executioner.”

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But this was growing far too serious for a Japanese discussion, and we all laughed at Monsieur’s expense. Our servant Buddha came in to announce dinner. As Taro San would not join us, we told him to wait. “Wait,” answered Buddha, whose increased knowledge of English is making him simply irrepressible. “Wait, no – America – rude! Sukoshi mate – wait a little.” I turned to Taro San who had risen to go: “Ah! So that is it! Nippon does not say ‘wait,’ but Sukoshi mate.” Louis Lloyd

By Lantern Light: A Japanese Sketch The Week 21 June 1889

You will smile when I tell you what we prize most amongst the quaint Japanese jimcracks we have collected about us at Kudau. It is not the bit of old china for which Garth gave a fancy price as genuine, and which she now professes to think worth thrice the sum as an imitation, nor is it the small pipe a Japanese damsel presented to me at the fair, an immediate return after the Japanese fashion for the ornamental hair-pin I had jokingly stuck in her chignon. It is not even the Kakimono, the beautiful mellow picture where Buddha sits smiling quizzically at life. It is only a photograph, the photograph of a geisha, with her tiny dainty card, and the faded yellow chrysanthemum she wore the night we saw her. Yet we keep these relics with lover-like jealousy, and show them as if they were curious. They will be curious some day when the type which the portrait represents shall have A Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood 193

changed, as it inevitably must, into something more European, when amusement, thanks to our civilization, shall have become more complicated, and romance as dead in Japan as it is at home. Even you, I think, who have had no education in Japanese standards of feminine beauty, would find a strange new charm in the face before me. It has the dignity of an old-fashioned duchess and the unconsciousness of a child. Despite the classic regularity of its small features there is a world of sweetness about its funny little painted mouth, and all in trying only to please it captivates. O Mitsu San, Miss Honey, is written on the tiny card; this is O Mitsu San, the Japanese ideal of yesterday. One mild evening when a full moon was rising lazily over Tokyo, and the sky had emptied half its burden of stars into the moat, when the dark palace grounds before our house seemed full of a fantastic mystery, and the city at our feet a lantern studded mist, we suddenly longed for a little romance, Garth and I. It mattered not what the romance might be so long as it took us out into the witchery of the moonlight of Tokyo streets. We wondered how we could carry out Taro San’s suggestion of passing a genuine Japanese evening in a quaint out-of-the-way tea-house, and were contemplating the advisability of taking our servant, Buddha, as guide, interpreter, and chaperon, when Taro San himself made his appearance with the announcement that he had prepared an entertainment for us in a certain chaya off the Mukojima Cherry-Blossom Road, at which Miss Honey would sing and play her samisen. So we went forth, Garth, Taro San, and I, down the steep hill that leads from Kudau to the city, through the deserted streets with their dimly-lit houses, looking little better than huge 194 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

paper lanterns set down by the wayside, past the moats and out into the eccentric shadows of the avenue of leafless cherry trees. It was very still. We could only hear the clap-clap, clap-clap, of the watchman making their rounds, the soft laughter and the twanging of the samisens from the tea-houses, and the even patter of the coolies’ feet as our jinrikishas flitted along with quite a delicious air of mystery. Tokyo has no night, at least nothing that we call night. Those of her citizens who would be particularly amused find their pleasures at a chaya, and others retire quietly under their futons at nightfall. Theatres are open only in the daytime, and, besides the garden parties, I know of no other forms of Japanese diversion. But somehow one never thinks of the Japanese as saying “Upon such a day, at such an hour, doing such a thing I shall be amused.” Pleasure with him is not a final reward but a subtle something leavening the whole. The artist needs no greater delight than he finds in his work. The existence of the little servant is one subdued laugh. And the labourer, straining and panting while he drags his heavy load, still smiles as if it were play, and takes every step to the sound of a lustily shouted refrain. I thought about these things hurrying along in the moonlight, and thought of something else which saddened me. All this beautiful, strange, free life was going to end. There was no help for it. If Japan wanted to be one of us – and I knew she did wish it – she must do as we do. We would teach her how art was a labour, and labour a drudgery, how the artist should find recreation elsewhere than in his art, and the working man should look upon life as an irremediable evil mixed with whisky, how much more civilized people were who read Zola and were bored by Wagner, than those who wondered over the story A Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood 195

of the Forty-Seven Ronin and found their delight in O Mitsu San’s playing, how difficult a thing it was to get pleasure and how when she thought she had it she should not rest content until she had analysed it. We would fill her mind with unattainable ideals and her soul with the sublime discontent of civilization. Poor precocious child of the East, whom I saw so blindly ambitious, so fatally anxious to learn our ways and follow them. Would we not tell her to preserve as her independence those instincts for which we try in vain to find a substitute by education. But our jinrikishas had stopped. The teahouse was a quarter of a mile distant across the rice fields which stretched, inundated with water, on either side of the pathway. Close by the tea-house we could see the low, carved roof of a temple, and in the tea-house garden, a tiny Shinto shrine. There was a lake too in the garden where the wonderful wisteria blossoms would be able to contemplate their loveliness a few months hence. But now everything was quite bare; the country seemed only a delicate sketch waiting for the paintbrush of spring. The mistress of the tea-house and two of her maidens received us. We pattered in our stocking feet through a maze of narrow passages running between white paper walls on which every here and there was reflected the fantastic form of a little dancer. We entered the room set aside for our entertainment, and sat us down on velvet cushions on the floor, and the little maidens brought tall white paper lanterns and tea and mandarins, a great hibachi, and three little smoking boxes, then we waited. The Japanese are far too artistic a people to hurry, far too artistic to spoil the effect by overcrowding or rush. They make of the commonest duty a ceremony, and of the offering 196 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

of a cup of tea an entertainment. They are content to look upon one flower at a time, and while the elaborateness of our pleasure bores us, they are delighted with the simplicity of theirs. The paper door slid back and O Mitsu San entered on her knees followed by three little dancers. They were the veriest butterflies, those dancers, with their dresses of dark blue and bright patterns, their gold-embroidered obis, their great flying sleeves, and their coiffures sparkling with tinsel ornaments. Though they appeared mere children, their grace and pretty assurance were of women three times their ages. But to O Mitsu San we lost our hearts. Everything she said was spoken in a gentle interrogative tone, pleasing to us and peculiarly flattering to masculine ears. It is true that when we tried to return her compliments she laughed, but she laughed apologetically, and hid as much as she could of it in her sleeve. When she played on the samisen to accompany the little dancers, and when she sang, it was a new fascination. When the dancing was over, and the saki [sic] cup was being passed round, she handed me her little pipe after having taken a puff and refilled it, and I accepted her courtesy as an honour; Taro San was amused but highly pleased. He told us to confirm our taste that no less than six Japanese ministers had married geishas! But still O Mitsu San is a Japanese maiden of yesterday. She could never compete with the emancipated ladies of the ball-room nor the contingent from America. In his heart I think Taro San prefers the dainty creature in kimono and pattens, with her single accomplishment of pleasing, to all the wise dames of the West, but his duty to himself and country appears to leave no choice between O Mitsu San and her bowing and laughing, her soft ways and her samisen, and the lady in A Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood 197

tournure and tall bonnet, with manners as stiff as the one, and attitudes as despairing as the other. “Good-night, Sayonara, O Mitsu San,” and from the little figure kneeling on the threshold of the tea-house, out to us as we walked across the rice fields, came an echo Sayonara – Sayonara from old Nippon to Japan. Louis Lloyd

Letters from Japan (The Week 9 August 1889)

Sayonara I had grown a great deal too fond of it, absurdly fond of it, and suddenly I had to go away, horribly far away, and perhaps forever. The fascination that Japan had exercised over me was the fascination of perfect naïveté, the fascination of a child, a quaint, unconscious, bewitching, laughing creature, singing incomprehensible melodies, doing incomprehensible things, and when the time came to say “good-bye,” alas! it was like saying “good-bye” to a child. Neither Buddha, nor Tomi, nor O Mitsu San, nor even Taro San could understand in the least what I felt at leaving them and their beautiful country. I tried to tell them, but they only laughed and drew in their breath and bowed. How could they understand? How could they know all the charm of their soft ways, the delight of their fairy-land? And yet their sweet callousness was but a charm the more! I parted with them as one parts for the first time with children at the school-room door, with a sort of vague fear, an infinite regret. A new knowledge was coming to them. They were very ambitious and very blind. They would forget the 198 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

old knowledge and the old knowledge them. The old civilization was so strangely beautiful. It was quite unique. The world had never seen anything before like it, and would never see anything like it again. A civilization all naïve love, and naïve art, and naïve bravery. Was there no one who would save even so much as a Japanese bow, a Japanese compliment, from the general revolution? … It was a very pitiless night the night I rode away from Tokyo, with its soft lights and its quiet shadows, and its gentle undertone of pattering feet, away into the glare and shrieks and bustle of a civilization, that seemed even more vulgar than before. The sky was as free from the faintest cloud of regret as the faces of Buddha or O Mitsu San, the stars looked down at me like mocking Japanese eyes; a light fall of snow covered the ground, the air was like steel against my face, and yet the tears would come – but you must have been to Japan to understand why. Next morning left Taro San bowing low to me on the wharf at Yokohama, and O Mitsu San bowed low to somebody else. Of course they were both laughing their incomprehensible little laugh, and this made the Frenchman standing beside me on the steam launch sigh very profoundly, and made me sigh, too. “Oh what immense indifference!” he exclaimed, “their hearts are like red lacquer boxes full of sweet words and dainty compliments. They give to everybody, but feel for none.” The tiny O Mitsu San dipping down on the wharf seemed such a very tiny thing to inspire such a big phrase that I laughed and wondered whether after all for us it wasn’t really only a joke. But when the last sayonara had died away, and the houses of Yokohama and even Fugiyama 4 [sic] had sunk into the distance, and I stood looking at a gray sky and a gray sea, and listening to a party of A Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood 199

hard-voiced wrangling Europeans, I knew it was no joke, unless all delicate beauty and exquisite pleasures are jokes. We stopped but a short time at Kobé .… After Kobé we had some hours of dreaming in the inland sea, and then a hurried visit to the quaint, mixed-up, pretty Nagasaki. The inland sea is an enchanted sea ebbing and flowing amidst enchanting islands.… It might have been the weather, but the day we passed through it had not alone all the charm, the quaintness, the naïveté of Japanese scenery, it had also a subtle sympathy, a misty melancholy, which Japanese scenery seldom possesses. I wanted to put my hands towards the little hills that looked at me so pitifully through a wet haze, towards the grim mountains like fierce old native warriors, towards the sky that dropped rain like tears on my face and to say, “Arigato, Arigato for sorrowing with me thus.” I confess it quite frankly that what interested me most about Nagasaki was the fact that the French writer, Pierre Loti, had lived there and had written all about the little town in “Madame Chrysanthème.” … Pierre Loti has not troubled himself much about the soul of the Japanese – the something which is beyond their bows and their laughing, and their compliments; but their bows, and their laughing, and their compliments he has described with the most exquisite of modern art. He is first of all an artist, his book first of all a picture, but a picture delicate and minute as Japanese bronze work; perfect in its imperfection, like the suggestions of things the Japanese paint across their fans; a picture where you can feel the soft Japanese air, and smell the discreet perfume of Japanese flowers; where you can see delicious sketches of Japanese sky, and all the dainty confusion of Japanese life under it – temples 200 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

and tea-houses, shaven priests and laughing mousmés, nights of strange dreaming to strange music, and nights of fairy revelry by lantern light. Before I had arrived in Japan Monsieur Loti had taught me to love it, and when I was going away it was no small consolation to know that I carried in the pages of “Madame Chrysanthème” something more than a memory of all that had so fascinated me.… I had just a little time on shore in Nagasaki. I spent that time in a last wild scurry in jinrikisha through its streets, in a long, long look at Monsieur Loti’s little houses “high perched in a quaint quarter amidst green gardens,” and then I went into a music shop to buy a samisen. It was the last time I had them all about me – those dear, curious Japanese, and I had them about me to the number of the entire street’s occupants. It was so very funny to see me there sitting on the floor in my foreign dress and chattering à la phrase book that they were convulsed with laughter. I laughed too. One loses so many laughs by not laughing at oneself.… And now I have my samisen, and the kimom5 from the little dancer at Nikko, and the faded chrysanthemum from the fair. They lie before me like a fancy costume after a ball, saying nothing but that the music and the laughter have died away, and the lights have gone out, and now it is gray morning. Louis Lloyd

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“A fter J apan ” An Incident by the Sea (The Week 27 December 1889)

When we arrived in Colombo the Indian mirage that had been floating deliciously before our minds, fantastically magnificent as only a mirage can be, suddenly lifted before a British reality. Big hotels, and banks, and steamship offices, main-street drapers’ shops, and suburban pharmacies where they sold everything, including the last bit of yellow-backed literature. Instead of temples climbing to the sky, we found the latest manifestation of commercial architecture; instead of nabob’s palaces, the “married officers’ quarters.” We who waited to lie under the palm trees, listening to the lazy burr of native life, eating strange luscious things and watching our fine dreams take body, we had to go into a Y.W.C.A. kind of coffee-house for – luncheon, – a luncheon of buns from which missionary zeal had deducted half the normal quantity of currants, of soda water in which missionary influence had paralyzed all the “fizz.” Of course, I can’t help confessing that it was not disagreeable to be met by the kindliest British hospitality, warmed to greater kindliness by a tropical sun, rather than by a set of gleaming white teeth with ill-disguised designs upon our persons; only the Cingalese are the softest-mannered people in the world, the evidence of the missionary hymns to the contrary. They were very charming to us, the English inhabitants of Colombo. The “oldest inhabitant” whom we visited in his bungalow, furnished like an English gentleman’s farm-house, gave Garth as a present his beautiful “Guide,” bound in red 202 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

leather, and a later edition bound in cloth, and four pamphlets of statistics, and the promise of all the useful information – which we didn’t require. The principal paper of the place put in the most fatherly little paragraph, charging its readers to help us in any way they could, and casting us upon their hospitality – as if we had been lady delegates to a convention. But all this wasn’t Eastern, nor was it what we had come for. After all one can only get what is Eastern, what one has come for, here and there throughout the East. I was sitting in our room in the “Galle Face Hotel.” It was a very big room, high, with big windows, big doors, and two big beds, fearfully white and covered so closely with mosquito netting that I thought at first there must be somebody dead in them. The air that came through the windows was as hot as if the windows opened onto a fire. Now and then a wandering crow, overpowered by the heat, rested him awhile on the shutter. We of the West have no idea of the sociability of this Eastern variety. It hopped to the sill, strutted fearlessly about the floor and seemed disposed to all sorts of friendliness, until it saw the pamphlet of statistics over which I was pondering. Of course, if I had come to Ceylon for that, if I had come to learn about the legislation and not where the loveliest loiterers were to be found; about English commerce, and not about the mysterious mass in the native town; about dusty facts of wars and conquests, and not the secrets of the pine groves, there was no use talking. And it flapped disgustedly away. Suddenly Garth came in on tiptoe and put something between me and the pamphlet of statistics. It was a flower. It was a very large flower, with a multitude of velvety rounded petals, pearly pink, like the lining of a shell. I took it up in my hands. I looked into it as one looks in A Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood 203

the face of a living thing. Its perfume was fine and strong. I bent lower over it with a sort of rapture. I put my lips close to its warm soft leaves. Then I felt my brain grow giddy. It was the heart of India that I held. Between me and the pamphlet of statistics Garth had put a lotus. One evening after sunset I went into the Petta, the native quarter. Like most “planet pilgrims” whose knowledge of Her British Majesty’s Eastern possessions has been bounded to what they can see while the P. and O. steamers stop to “coal,” we had come to the conclusion that between Her British Majesty’s subjects and the natives there was a lack of understanding, a lack of sympathy, a lack of any sort of desire on the part of each to appreciate the other, which it was our duty to rectify to as great an extent as time would permit.6 Like most “planet pilgrims,” we thought the fault lay principally on the British side. The British would make no concessions. They were there to govern, and to administer justice, and to make money (perhaps, I ought to write these duties in the inverse order), and the heart of India might talk to the stars and the palm trees murmur to the sea, it did not concern them. Neither did it concern them to pay the nations those delicate little compliments – the employment of their stuffs for European clothes and of their designs for European furniture – which might have appealed to the savage intelligence with infinitely more beneficial effect than the uncompromising justice of a bargain, or the awful justice in the carrying out of the law. Garth and I had decided that one of the means we might employ to bring about sympathy between the two nations we deemed so necessary was to – no, not exactly – adopt the native dress; but to buy ourselves frocks made out of native material. 204 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

The idea had come to us before, as early as our visit to Singapore, but then we were directed to a masculine dressmaker. One doesn’t all at once get reconciled to the idea of a masculine dressmaker, but a genuine tailor is a very different matter and the steamer started off in the meantime. I was going into the Petta to buy this native material. The hostess of the “Galle Face” warned me the Petta was scarcely safe at noon-day and that the Cingalese were a villainous set. I regarded my hostess with all the pitying superiority of one or two days’ experience, and concluded the English were even more blindly prejudiced than I feared. I unhesitatingly took a jinrikisha with a lithe, swift runner, and we – if a man who takes up shafts doesn’t cease to be a man – darted out into the Indian twilight. The “Galle Face Hotel” is about a mile from the town. It stands off alone by the sea in a sort of sentimental contemplation; that was one of the reasons why we chose it. It is the most appreciative British structure in Colombo. The road to the town runs along the shore. On the one side the sea, and on the other a wide stretch of ground stretching inwards without any houses. When the rank and fashion, who make of this road a sort of Rotten Row, have gone in after dark, it is almost deserted, and utterly still, but for the even, incessant, muffled chords the waves play on the sand. The natives were coming home from their work in the English quarter. As the eye of the “Planet Pilgrim” rests upon them after having rested upon the British labourer, his resentment at the small measure of regard they receive grows apace. The men are not slouchy, and patched and redfaced; the women, even the poorest, have nothing bedraggled and tawdry about them. They are fit to be painted or cut out in marble as they walk in A Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood 205

an exquisite procession of soft, deep colour and delicate line against the fading light of the sky. The shop my runner took me to had Europeanized its stock to a great extent to suit its European customers; but, beside the old conventional prints and muslins, there was a pile of native stuffs it gladdened the heart to behold. These stuffs were chiefly such as are used by the Cingalese gentlemen for their nether garment – an improvised article of clothing that looks much as if they had hastily wrapped themselves in a tablecover. The choice was not wide, but there was no need for it to be, everything was so charming in colour and design. At first I felt a strong temptation to buy a most characteristic bit with exquisite blue and red in it on a pale yellow background, but the pattern betrayed a zoological inspiration, and I feared that, if I wore it, I might be mistaken for an animated chart of the animal kingdom of the country. The material I finally fixed upon was not so ambitious, but none the less pretty – a yellow cotton, with a delicate border of red embroidery, telling it was “native.” My runner, who had left his jinrikisha, and stood watching me from the shop door, approved my choice by a smile, and some other men whom I had not noticed before and who also stood at the shop door, approved too. I had no objection to my runner’s approving – a runner for the time being is your guide, interpreter and councillor, – but I objected to the other men. The native sympathy seemed to be coming rather more quickly than I felt prepared for, rather more quickly than I quite understood. The sundry preliminaries of getting a new dress, preliminaries which alone are enough to restrain the feminine extravagance of the West, had an unimaginable charm in the back room of that shop in the Petta. The hideous little parlour 206 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

with its horse-hair furniture, the air redolent of garlic, the fussy pin-eating dame, gave place to a nook hung with Eastern stuff, the smoke of burning perfume and a dark, delicate-limbed creature who seemed to be of fallen princely fortunes. He had very fine clever fingers this dark creature, and an artistic eye, and when the surprise of the situation subsided the situation appeared to me very strongly artistic. On our way home, passing the big pond of lotuses that lies on the outskirts of the native town, something started up from the road-side and a moment afterwards I recognized one of the men who had stood at the door of the shop in the Petta smiling his approval upon me. He was smiling still. I resented his smiling; I resented the man; I poked my runner with my umbrella and told him to go on. But my runner didn’t go on. He stopped and exchanged a few words with this disagreeable apparition and the result was that the disagreeable apparition volunteered his help and began pushing the jinrikisha behind, while the runner pulled between the shafts. The combination alarmed me. It was made without the slightest semblance of asking my permission and seemed premeditated. They went at a very deliberate pace and when they got to the road by the sea they slackened it still more. The night had come some time before. There was no moon, but the stars were out, only the stars had a look in them as if they had been the eyes of the hostess of the “Galle Face.” I involuntarily clutched my Japanese umbrella. But alas! I had left the country where an attack could be parried with a fan, an intrusion prohibited with a paper screen. Just then the man who was pushing put his head through the little window at the back of the jinrikisha and I felt his hot breath close on my neck. With the only native expletive A Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood 207

I had at my disposal I jumped to my feet so that the runner dropped the shafts and stumbled on to the road. My previous hopes of adventure – that I might dispute the right of way with a snake, or spend a glorious ten minutes’ tête à tête with a tiger, in that moment disappeared. Everything disappeared but the horrid fact of two dark faces in the still, pale starlight. If one of Her Majesty’s most valiant servants would appear upon the scene, if only one would come I should promise never, never to buy any more native stuffs or want to establish bonds of sympathy between these sons of darkness and the Saxons, but I should approve of keeping these sons of darkness down under an iron heel forever. “Stop this, you rascals! Pallayan, you cowards! Stop, I say, or I’ll” And there arose from I didn’t know where – I learned afterwards it was from a bicycle – a British Theseus in white ducks. This British Theseus so utterly petrified my runner and the other man that they continued to stand there grinning. Then the British Theseus gave the native nearest to him a British blow and the native went staggering into the dust. The other native followed his example and both began salaaming Sahib! with their foreheads to the ground. “You’re one of the ladies the ‘Observer’ told us to be kind to, are you not?” said the British Theseus as he left me at the entrance of the “Galle Face” hotel. Louis Lloyd

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A Sunday in Calcutta The Week 14 February 1890

... The first few hours after sunrise in Calcutta are the saddest we have seen. There are no crowds of buxom housewives about the streets such as one sees at home, expressing by firm step, ruddy cheeks, and fresh sharp voice the whole significance of morning; there is no cheerful din of street cries; there is no awakening to new life. The European dames will only make their appearance at a much later hour of the day, and the few Indian women we see flitting past, with a bit of their sari drawn across their mouths, look much like creatures of the night surprised by dawn and trying to hide themselves. The vendors of milk and the water-carriers are already overpowered under the weight of the brass and earthen jars they carry, and the melancholy oxen jog along with a resigned conviction in their eyes that man has little else for them but a stick, and the earth an interminable stretch of sun-scorched, dusty road. Great flocks of crows float cawing wisely through the air as if they were preparing for a funeral, and the city all the while smiles sadly in the morning light like some one remembering a sorrow. Rohim Ali brings us to the New Market with evident pride.… A swarm of half-clad, sad-faced, hustling men and bewitching imps, with the sweet hypocrisy of Asia already lighting their beautiful eyes, come round us begging to be taken to carry our purchases in the baskets on their heads. But a choice is difficult, for we are not callous, Garth and I, to the charms of Apollo noses, and teeth as white and even as white seeds, lithe, graceful forms, and appealing salaams.… [T]he Indian woman is not here and we miss her. We miss her everywhere in Indian life, and A Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood 209

we feel embarrassed and uncomfortable just as one does when one enters a house where somebody is in disgrace.7 Mid-day, the hour at which social Calcutta receives and pays its visits, our gharry stops under a great cool portico, like those found at the entrance of all Indian houses.… Our [Anglo-Indian] hostess sits amidst a pretty medley of Indian bric-a-brac, a gown of soft Indian stuff falling about her, receiving the unending stream of Sunday visitors, who come and go, as she expresses it, “like bees running up and down a honey-pot,” with a grace that can only be the result of English dignity tempered by Indian sunlight.… [I]n everything she does, … our hostess tries, just as poets are trying, not to bring Indian and Englishman into a forced relationship, but to show them the pleasant places where both may meet together to reason about graver things.… We come home from our tennis-party along a well-known road, over a certain bridge, and through the maidan, all strangely beautiful to us in this late afternoon. The air is very still and warm. The shadows in the little lakes by the wayside seem to be lingering there to cool themselves. The masts and the rigging of the ships in the river are drawn across the red gold sky like the web of some monster spider. Europeans, curiously indifferent to everything about them, pass and repass us continually in a long string of carriages. The native Hindoo flits about under the trees, dozes casually where he may, or sits doing nothing as only a native can, while here and there are Mohammedans in solemn lines, praying as I thought men had forgotten to pray. One worshipper we discover away off in a quiet field all alone. He has put down his burden and is kneeling. We come up quite close to him, but he is oblivious to 210 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

everything. For the moment the light in his dark, faithful, passionate eyes seems almost sacred to us – he is looking towards Mecca. Louis Lloyd

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“Parisian Topics” In Holiday Attire (Montreal Daily Star 8 June 1889)

Paris at her Brightest and Best Paris, May 23, 1889. – Paris to-day is the Paris of nearly a hundred years ago. The shops on the boulevards are filled with such dainty fans and furbelows, such quaint conceits, such delicately tinted stuffs, that one wonders how any artist had ever the temerity to imagine they could stand our rougher handling, and our grimy modern air. The Parisians trip about à la Directoire in ruched skirts and big hats, and look seductively at you through clouds of tulle tied in a bunch under their chin. Flags are flying, and there is much noise and hustling and confusion. Paris is en scène. Paris is posing for the rest of the world. She likes it. She likes to feel that in far away Japan the admirative Japanese speak of her with much indrawing of the breath; the dreaming Hindoo, with wonder, and that there is not a donkey-boy or dragoman of Cairo whose eyes do not grow bright at the mere mention of the Champs de Mars. The French can’t have a war just yet, but they can have an Exposition. It is better to have an Exposition. Nevertheless the Paris of to-day will jar upon you should you have left it two years ago in the sleepy dignity of a June afternoon, and have returned to find your favorite haunts overrun by an uncomprehending multitude, and invaded by the carpenter and the charwoman; and of all the uncomprehending, exquisitely irritating multitudes, a provincial one is the most so, for you have not the indulgence of the good people of Paris for these weaker brethren, an indulgence which extends to 212 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

the young men with blue ties and a swagger, and clothes of the latest cut, trying so hard to pass for Parisians that no one could ever possibly mistake them; to the maidens with shy eyes and blushes, exerting every effort not to be astonished, and persistently sitting on the edges of things; to old men, argumentative, hot and fuming; to matrons all nerves and prim ways; even to the smiling apple-faced dame from Normandy who admires the Bon Marché in the Grand Opera, and the rubicund autocrat of the fields who quite fails to appreciate the difference between the dandy of the boulevard and his Jacques in sabots at home. When I arrived I went to see Madame at the Pension. Madame had changed, the Pension had changed, and the old Pension garden where the birds used to sing as if they were tipsy in the spring time had changed too. The birds seemed posing with the rest of Paris; each sang in his own affected little way, not for mere joyousness, but with one small eye upon his audience, trying with all his tiny might for the first prize of the Exposition of ’89. The modest Pension de Famille had suddenly become “Hotel__,” and a very grand name, and “Hotel__,” was printed above the door, and on the door-mat, and woven into the table-napkins which had grown to three times their normal dimensions, like Madame’s pride and Madame’s prices. When I climbed up the five flights of steps to look at what I remembered my dear, dirty little room under the roof with its view of a myriad chimney-pots, its torn wall-paper, the victim of the decorative instincts of successive generations of artists, and its parquet floor, dusty and stained by successive artistic feasts, I found even here the baneful influence of the Exposition, for I was asked ten francs a day for the privilege

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of sleeping in a chamber as uncongenially immaculate as a convent dormitory! It began in a very modest way, the gorgeous illumination of the 6th in honor of the opening of the Exposition, and in honor of the hundredth anniversary of the Convocation of the Etats Géneraux. At a little garret window across the way, six Chinese lanterns were lighted, even while it was yet day, lest there should come the threatened downpour, and the world be thus deprived of the knowledge of how true a patriot lived in that tiny room under the roof. For patriots in tiny rooms under the roof are not theorists and dreamers, but practical people, to whom a practical manifestation of their patriotism is indispensable from time to time either in the form of paving stones or Chinese lanterns. The Republic seems to be giving every opportunity for employment of the latter. As it grew darker every tower and dome and palace was picked out in light against the night, but no one dreamt of looking at any other tower or dome or palace besides the Tour Effel [sic], the Dome of the Exhibition buildings and the Palace of the Trocadéro. The Trocadéro had been transported bodily from the Arabian Nights; the Dome with its rivers of diamonds and flying Angel of gold, from some even more enchanted source, while the Tour encircled by the smoke and the red flames of Bengal lights and climbing into the sky to rival the moon with the electric light on its summit, gave the good populace yet greater satisfaction than any gift of the gods or the fairies, being of the imagination and construction of a Parisian. From the trees on the banks of the Seine, red lanterns hung like huge red berries, and on the river the boats were hung with lanterns too. The boats had bands that made music, and over the 214 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

water fell the electric light from the Tour Effel [sic] (the moon having ventured several unsuccessful attempts to compete with it had finally found it advisable to retire), and they were happy, these Parisians, looking at these things. Though there was much crush and crowding, and though there were many children to be taken to the show, I heard never a single whimper, or a single word of complaint. Such people are made for Expositions and Grandes Fêtes. Louis Lloyd

Native Talent Abroad Montreal Star 15 July 1889

Some Canadian Artists in Paris Nothing makes people so patriotic as living away from home. They realize, as they never realized before, their national individuality, and they are filled with a national pride and ambition which it is very good for them to have – especially for Canadians. A Canadian is supposed variously in Europe to be an Englishman, an American, a Frenchman, or an Indian, and we are none of these. We are – that is to say, we have come to the conclusion that we shall be to the inquiring stranger – the happy medium between all four. To the freedom of the Red Man we join the lightheartedness of the Gaul; and while having the simplicity of speech of the Yankee and the frankness of the Britisher, we are haply blessed with ten times the sensibility of the one and twenty times the tact of the other! In looking over an American paper I saw that with characteristic appetite it had appropriated Mr. Paul Peel, and spoke of him as one of the A Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood 215

successful American artists at the Salon. I was very wroth, for I knew that Paul Peel was a Canadian, so I said within myself, people must be told this, and not only that Paul Peel is a Canadian, but that George Bridgman and Charles Alexander (he is Charles Alexander Smith at home, only his rapid progress of late has seemed to warrant his dropping the last name) and Miss Mary Bell, all of whom have excellent work in the Salon, are Canadians, too. Paul Peel, I suppose, ranks first among Canadian artists. He comes from London, Ontario, but has spent the last eight or nine years in Paris studying under Gerome, Benjamin Constant and Bouguereau. He exhibited this year two pictures, one of which gained him an Honorable Mention. He lost a medal by a single vote. The Etude, admirably modeled, and at once rich, and soft, and delicate, was the nude figure of a young girl standing before a mirror and teasing a kitten with the tassel of her wrapper. Que la vie est amère. The second painting represented an old artist with a white beard and black velvet jacket sitting before his canvas in a flood of sunlight. Work has been momentarily interrupted, for the small boy posing as Cupid has suddenly hidden himself behind the easel, where with two hands to his eyes he is crying his heart out. Paul Peel’s work is very simple, very dainty, and full of warmth and sympathy. In the disconsolate little back Cupid turns upon life a whole world of baby despair has been painted with charming pathetic humor, while Cupid himself is not one of Bouguereau’s bridgecake Cupids, but a Cupid of flesh and blood. When I saw Mr. Paul Peel the other day I asked him his opinion about Canadian artists here, and his opinion was very favorable indeed. He spoke with the kindest enthusiasm about his 216 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

artist compatriots, and held the highest hopes for them. Canada he considered a splendid field for work, and his eyes fairly glistened when he said how much he wanted to get one of our snow effects. Unfortunately, however, the facilities our country offers for disposing of snow effects are by no means commensurate with the facilities she offers for painting them. So that though Mr. Peel may pay Canada a flying visit, he will, in all probability, take up his abode in Paris. Mr. George Bridgman is spoken of as a gay and festive young gentleman with unlimited talent. For the rest his Salon picture showed it. It was a large canvass and hung very conspicuously “on the fine.” A midshipmite has fallen into the sea. You can just catch a glimpse of his white little face against the waves. Fast coming up to him is a life-boat borne along by the wind at head-long speed. Some sailors are bending over the side, and one has his arm outstretched to grab the boy as they dash by. If the moment chosen for the picture is rather too full of suspense, too painfully anxious, it has afforded Mr. Bridgman an opportunity of exhibiting an amount of character and strength and dramatic intensity of feeling quite marvelous in so young an artist. Mr. Bridgman, I hear, like Paul Peel, is not going to remain in Canada. He returned home last week, but intends moving on to the States. It is a pity, a great pity, we can’t keep our artists among us, a great pity our art patrons do not find it their duty and pleasure to patronize Canadian work, when Canadian work is of indescribable excellence, and can hold its own and receive reward and praise when in concurrence with the best that Europe exhibits. Mr. Charles Alexander’s “La Soif” promised very good things, while Miss Mary Bell’s “La A Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood 217

Petite Malade” was full of feeling and got most flattering criticism from no less an individual than the Master Carolus Duran himself. It was an interior in Brittany. A woman sits with a sick child on her lap, and a girl kneeling before it is trying to tempt it to eat. We see in Miss Bell’s painting what we see in the painting of the other Canadian artists, a frankness, a simplicity, a freshness which are fast becoming characteristic of Canadian work, work that though free and unconventional, is serious and honest; that speaks what it knows and feels, and knows well and feels deeply. French teaching has done for Canadian artists what it has done for French ones. It has not taught them to express forced sentiment in cut and dried phrases, but how to tell the simplest tale that crosses their mind in the truest possible manner; it has not taught them to search an ideal floating somewhere among the clouds, nor to idealize common life out of all recognition, but to find beauty and inspiration in the most ordinary scene; something paintable in everything they see. And this is why though Canada has no ruins or parks or velvety landscapes, her artists love her, for they have discovered the true significance of her pine forests, her hard fields, her tractless wastes of snow. They love her and would fain interpret her charm to us and the rest of the world, but we who are blind let them remain in foreign lands. We lose, lose heavily by it, only as it is not in dollars and cents we don’t care. So we go on liking our country because of its bright climate, and its sports and our friends, but the deeper feelings she can inspire we do not know, because we do not care to learn the deeper things she can tell us. I have said something about the Canadian artist, but I have not yet said how they win that success.

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My friend Rafaella, a Canadian, lives in a little apartment on one of the external boulevards, miles away from fashionable Paris, which she regards with artistic scorn. When I paid her an unexpected visit the other day, I found her in a paint-daubed apron absorbed over her easel in a tiny room quite bare but for a bed, the paint pots on the mantel-piece, the paint brushes in the soap-dish and the ewer, and the “Academics” all over the wall and even behind the wash-hand stand as “washers.” This didn’t mean pose or neglect, but work: Rafaella says one can’t serve Art and Society, so her horizon is bounded on the one hand by the last exhibition of paintings and on the other by her studio. She sees hardly anyone but artists, thinks of little besides art, so that should an unfortunate Philistine stray into her presence he finds himself in the embarrassing position of talking to a young lady intent, not upon what he is saying, but upon the “moulding” of his nose, the “character” of his mouth, or the “tone” of his hair. Rafaella gets up early and goes to work in the atelier every morning before nine. At twelve she takes déjeuner at a Crémerir patronized almost exclusively by artists and more famous for its paintings than its plats, paintings that have paid many a meal of petits pois and coarse bread. In the afternoon Rafaella works again till the light wanes and it is time to stroll for a breath in the Luxembourg gardens to study the pretty groups of models loitering in the square, or to drink a cup of tea delicately seasoned by artistic dissertations from some confrere. But, to be quite honest, such sympathetic tete-a-tetes, the charms of street scenes, the delicious lassitude in the cool garden shadows after a long hot day at the studio, are not Rafaella’s sole consolations. When Monsieur Tony A Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood 219

Robert Fleury, one of the first masters in Paris, did what he doesn’t do once in six months, when he praised her work before the whole class so that the girls came up afterwards to shake hands and congratulate her, the hours of horrible doubt and discouragement, the déjeuners of petits pois, the days and days of monotonous labor, seemed as nothing in the balance against that moment of triumph. Louis Lloyd

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“Parisian Personalities” Parisian Personages Pall Mall Gazette 19 November 1889

III – The Princess Gortschakoff The Princess Gortschakoff in modern society is what an “old master” might be at the Salon – neither challenging criticism nor suggesting comparison, but resting in the calm assurance that she is indisputable. From the mondaine who descends from her high estate to compromise herself in the political fray, as from the bourgeoise who rises from the political fray by “chic” and flattery and clever opportunism to the high estate, she is equally removed. If she cares nothing for the world, it isn’t because she is indifferent to shocking it, but because she knows she will do nothing to shock it with reason. People with more “ideas” than the force to carry them out may find in the Princess something conventional; but then it is not improbable that they would find the same verdict for a Holbein, a Velaquez, or a Rembrandt. After a summer in Switzerland and an autumn in a marble villa of Southern Italy, the Princess returns to winter in Paris. The house where she lives in the Faubourg St. Germain was built some time in the last century, and the concierge who opens the porte-cochère might date from earlier. The court beyond has a touch of moss here and there, like everything in the Faubourg; but there is no suggestion of desertion in the hôtel’s great apartments, warmed in December by huge log fires, and in the early spring through windows from floor to ceiling. At five the Princess can always be found in ­her petit salon, resting before dinner from the afterA Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood 221

noon’s visits. She is not one of those who indulge in tea-gowns; her dresses are always tight-fitting, of some warm colour – very often crimson – because of her dark hair and small dark eyes, and strong, clear-cut face. Though there is an air of femininity in the room, it is rather suggested by the soft-toned draperies, the chairs and sofas Louis Quinze, the golden flight of silly cupids above the paneling – for there are no meaningless knicknacks about. On the small table by the Princess’s chair a forgotten handkerchief, a bunch of violets, temper but half the severity of the Temps, the Revue des Deux Mondes, some sternly philosophical book in which women are not prone to revel. Speaking in English gives still greater frankness to the Princess’s manner. There being no blots on her escutcheon which she has to paint over with affectation, she can afford to be very direct. She enjoys the rare privilege of telling the truth, but with instinct as rare when accompanying such a privilege of substituting for it silence when necessary. Her laugh is sympathetic, her smile knows no degree of pleasantness, she meets every one with a sort of superb simplicity. The Princess talks a good deal about art, for she is an enthusiastic collectionneuse. When she has returned from a curio hunt in the Hôtel Drodot she is full of her conquest of a rare vase, a picture, full of laughing scorn for the obstinate creature who outbid her for another coveted bibelot. If somewhat conventional, her taste is sure, and she prefers a few indisputable treasures to a labyrinth of bric-à-brac. When she has no doubt of an artist’s talent, she helps him with illimitable patronage; but she tells him fearlessly if she thinks he would succeed better in something else. Her hôtel to the Princess is only a larger bibelot, and she shows it to her friends with the same 222 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

satisfaction: the drawing room, with its polished inlaid floor and white fur rugs, its flowers and monster palms, its rare cabinets and wonderful paneling; another salon, dark with Indian draperies; another, and yet another – to the State bedroom, white and silver from toilette-table to ceiling. One room opens into the next, and they all open upon a low white terrace with steps leading from it to the garden. It is a very wonderful garden for Paris – not only, as M. Dumas has remarked, “very high,” but also very broad and very long. Paths lose themselves in the green distance – or climb over serious-looking bridges, or lead with precipitancy to threatening caverns; and a deep-toned lawn of heavy velvet, patterned with multi-coloured flower-beds, pleasant to look upon as a bit of old brocade, spreads itself out with conscious dignity, like the train of a grande duchesse. Art has done a good deal, but Nature is far from having been conventionalized into the exaggerated sampler that represents her in other French gardens: there is an air of freedom, of solid naturalness about everything, and in the tossing branches of the unpruned trees an independence absolute. The Princess doesn’t cheapen hospitality in multitudinous manifestations – in five o’clocks and bric-à-brac-ish dances. Her hospitality is splendid, and therefore rare. Twice or three times only during the season does the Figaro announce a fête that makes Society prick up its ears with unique unanimity, that is more desirable than the sum of the winter’s engagements, and that will atone in a measure for the departed glories of the Tuileries and Versailles. Many and various will be the ruses to obtain invitations. They give a cachet which nothing can take away; and, though with A Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood 223

much astuteness the Parisian may find it possible to account for his absence by a previous engagement, it is always more convincing when such engagements have not been allowed to interfere. But the Princess hates snobs and will have none of them, and when in her suite of salons the candles and mirrors, the diamonds and the women’s eyes play a rhapsody of light; when colour flames everywhere deep and regal, and the guests greet each other after the manner of the lesser divinities, few are there there out of harmony to the extent of a semitone, whose ancestors have not saluted life for many generations back with just the same grace as these genuflecting seigneurs. Perhaps no aristocracy anywhere has been less influenced by the Modern Movement than the French one – the movement which hurries along the boulevards and trips it up the Champs Elysées. When the Modern Movement gets to the Seine it instinctively slackens pace, on the bridges dawdles undecidedly, looks with mock reverence at the Institute, the Beaux Arts, the streets of eighteenth-century houses, and then with a sudden shrug walks back again, leaving the Faubourg St. Germain uninvaded. And such an invasion the Faubourg St. Germain is not likely to desire. To divest itself of a custom, a form, a prejudice, means something more than self-improvement, there is a suggestion in it of compromise with the Republic; and rather than compromise with the Republic it were better to perpetuate the age of the Grand Monarque indefinitely. The Princess’s Salons are replete with the fine fleur of Paris. A myriad exotics are everywhere to breathe them flattering welcome. And subtly, unobtrusively, insinuatingly, veiled music accompanies it all.

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An old seigneur approaches the hostess with a bow Louis Quartorze [sic], as rare, as precious, as exquisite as a snuff-box of the King himself. Long loyalty to the mildewed Faubourg has made his ardent graciousness of somewhat painful expression, but with a heroism of which none but an old seigneur could be capable, he leaves all rheumatic considerations out of the question. Low, very low he bends, much lower than the modern seigneur would find necessary, touches the hand with a sort of adoration, then slowly straightens himself, gallant and radiant, covering his sufferings with a smiling compliment. The antiquated grande dame is perhaps a little less charming, her prejudices are somewhat aggressive; but the jeune fille of the Faubourg is altogether adorable. Delicate, fine, graceful, her courtesy does her convent credit, and she drops her eyes bewitchingly under the least provocation. Her future fiancé is presented to her, and she salutes him with wellpracticed self-possession. Her future fiancé is an affable young gentleman, but he doesn’t bow as low as his grandfather. He has learned the English “shake-hands”; he has likewise learned a truc or two of the boulevards, a smattering of theories fin-de-siècle. Foreign princes chatter here and there, a pretty Baronne is doing her best to shock ce froid Anglais, and foreign Ambassadors turn them solemnly around with diplomatic conscientiousness to smile on all alike. But with the young attaché diplomatic obligations weigh less heavily. He will not be in Paris always, so he finds it incumbent upon him to expend them for the moment on the Parisienne alone, as she stands flame eyed and pale in her jewel-studded dress, like a wicked little snake among the pale green curtains.

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Paul Veronese attempted something like it, but the Marriage Feast at Cana is a mere embryonic suggestion compared with the supper-table of the Princess Gortschakoff. Her gold plate is historical; the French chef has stretched his imagination to its utmost limit; and French florists have been allowed to practice their riotous art to the extinction of every glimmer of the satiny cloth. There is almost a touch of barbarity in the splendour and in the freedom to all these luxuries; for, though it is rare to leave a Parisian table unsatisfied, it is not always easy to get over the idea of a recording angel in the person of the maître d’hôtel. The Princess’s fêtes never last very late. While it is still quite early in the morning the last carriage rolls away, and the big gates are closed and everything disappears in darkness – disappears like a phantom fête in the darkness of past centuries. Louis Lloyd

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Lily Lewis Rood

“Prose Poems” Prose Poems (The Bookman [New York] 1896)

The Face in the Mirror In the fog the lights of the streets were as drowning stars, and the woman often lost her way. When they passed into the white flare before the café windows the few people lingered a moment reassured, but when they walked through the uncertain darkness again they hurried by the other shadows suspiciously. Before a tall, still house the woman stopped, and at her ring the door opened with a snap and closed behind her noisily. Then she crept up a dark flight of stairs, and another, and another till the topmost landing was reached and light flecked the chinks of the door opposite. Her key opened it without noise, and beyond she drew aside a curtain. The room was all dull silver and pale green. Cupids threw each other eternal kisses from its corners, and at either end of the mantel a Sèvres shepherdess and Marquis smiled unceasingly. A man and woman standing before the mirror and stretching their hands to a flaming fire smiled too, till the man looked up and saw in the mirror a face as white as the fog, and eyes like two great blue lamps with flickering lights. For an immortal moment the mute face spoke and was answered, then the figure in the doorway vanished. And the man bent down to her who had stepped nearer the fire, unconscious. But when later he looked up again into the mirror, and later still, the lamplike eyes had remained, while the woman in the street was lost in the shrouding fog.

228 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

A Perfume The car was filled with a dusty, giddy heat, the floor crackled, and a curtain of smoke fell across the door. Gusts blew the cinders through any open window. Every place was crowded but the one beside me. And we rushed on, the people too feverish and intent to speak. Another passenger entered at a wayside station. I heard a stiff silk rustle behind me, and could feel a scrutinizing pause, then a quick movement forward, though there was no rival for the empty place. Nodding reluctant assent, I did not turn my head, but read on, now crowded with the rest. A space of rumbling, whizzing, shaking, and a perfume came towards me. The woman seemed to sit stiffly erect. My book tumbled at her feet. Picking it up, I saw that her dress was of old-time flowered silk, patterned with little faded roses on brown with bars of black. She held a bunch of old-time flowers, straight out, as if in the heat the flowers panted for breath. I leaned back, shutting my eyes, tired of my book. I thought her bonnet might be of brown straw with velvet geraniums, her face of crumpled tea-roses, perhaps. The perfume came to me again, caressingly, appealingly. The train sped more quickly and more quickly, so that when I looked out the blurred landscape seemed swimming under water. And another sweet-smelling wave, like lowtoned voices from an old-time garden. Then the train stopped, and the feverish crowd pushed forward. The woman was suddenly hidden when I turned to go, but the perfume called back to me, and I followed, forgetful of everything,

A Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood 229

dreaming, through the glare of the station and the crowd, till the perfume faded into the city air, was lost, and I stopped and smiled at myself pityingly. Lily Lewis Rood.

230 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

“Pierre Puvis de Chavannes”

P ierre P uvis

de

C havannes : A S ketch

(Boston: L. Prang & Company, 1895)

Perhaps there could have been no better reason for electing Puvis de Chavannes president of the New Salon, than the persistent refusal of his work by the Old, a distinction it had conferred upon other French masters of the century. And though, as in the case of these, it eventually repented in honors and medals, its later attitude had no power to retain de Chavannes when the opportunity occurred for him to show how little he really cared for such distinctions after all. Since then the master has been able to attend his own apotheosis, to contemplate his marble bust triumphant, and to acknowledge in person the tardy admiration of the many. Even Paris has rarely offered such homage. Yet still to those who know him best, the famous Banquet given last winter in his honor was a little like calling an unwilling actor before the curtain. One felt his desire to waive the admiration from himself to his Art. And if he bowed his thanks for the gaudy bouquets of speeches and poems with unimpeachable appreciation, one could not help understanding he was rather submitting gracefully to an inevitable requirement of the day; that he suffered it all gladly that Art might be glorified, and accepted the bouquets only to lay them at her feet. It was the schism in the Champs Elysées Salon that first brought de Chavannes’ personality distinctly into public notice. Before then it was little known except through his painting, and society in general called him ‘un sauvage.’ But when that A Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood 231

Artists’ War broke out – and an artistic war seems to afford particular opportunity for injustices – he felt he owed it to the future of Art to become, for the time being at least, in spite of his reluctance, something more active than a name. How much he disliked the campaign upon which he had just entered, even the most superficial could see, only it was obvious too at once that he had entered upon it solely because from its absolute necessity the New Salon had become inevitable. No one, however, ever took part in a fray with more restraint, and under no matter what provocation his reticence and reserve have never failed him. I remember a rush four years ago from Montparnasse to Montmartre when very early Paris was shivering under a wet March morning; a small door ‘au troisième’ opened by a man in an ambiguous dressing gown; the delightfully ignored contrast between this ‘sortie-de-bain’ and the courtesy of his greeting; and then the studio’s vague stillness and rare furniture, the walls haunted by photographs of the master’s work, the delicately dusty atmosphere, and the freshness of his presence amongst everything else that had faded and suggested only what was past. Even in a first brief meeting one could mark suggestions of the graceful awkwardness and impatient calm, the naïve wisdom & strong delicacy which to those who have crossed the threshold of his intimacy make the artist so intensely sympathetic. The argument of the Old Salon, that it was all very well to declare medals meant nothing to you when you had won them, was being met by an answer from the New to the effect that this was only a better proof of sincerity, and then something was added about judgment biased by the schools and academies. But more tangible reasons for the secession were not given very clearly. So if 232 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

anything was hinted about an uncongenial artistic proximity, it came from the keener public. To have kept the situation thus ambiguous was an inspiration, as time and tact have since been able to do their perfect work, and it is interesting now to note the interchange of compliments between the rivals. The President’s “Doux Pays,” which has long lightened the darkness of Monsieur Bonnat’s staircase, has been reciprocated by Bonnat’s “Triumph of Genius.” It stands on an easel in complimentary isolation in the studio of the Place Pigalle. But when people wonder today whether the obstreperous young Salon will ever return to the Champs Elysèes, the president is more conclusive. It can never be. “The points on which we disagree are too radical,” he declares, and in reality it would be as difficult to combine the most Grecian of republics with the most Russian of monarchies. The French may succeed in doing this sort of thing in politics, but hardly in art. So the two Salons are as completely divorced as they were four years ago, when the younger, chafing at multitudinous medals and at what is considered invidious school distinctions, made itself into a republic where the highest honor possible is that of becoming a ‘Sociètaire,’ by which – in name at least – one artist is equal to another. The only important change the New Salon has had to make in its regulations since its inauguration is to limit the number of pictures that each artist may send to eight. The first year some enthusiasts submitted forty! Preferring the quarters where artists live who can afford to discard all society but their own, Puvis de Chavannes has spent an indefinite number of years in Montmartre in the Place Pigalle, while in the green desertion of Neuilly – a part A Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood 233

of Paris that has gone to sleep for the benefit of artists and writers – he has built unto himself an atelier for work, a great long building a few feet from the ground, lighted entirely from above, and suggesting a Greek temple, only much more interesting. A little old woman accompanied by a little old dog with a body like a stem and a head like a ragged flower, keep guard. “He is the most delicious of dogs, he has no more teeth!” the artist laughs, as the discreet guardian fixes a lingering if unobtrusive eye on the occasional visitor to see that the visitor does not step on any of the fluffy beds of violets in the small garden, and then walks away unconcernedly as if his coming had been merely a mistake. In no matter what state of progress, the master’s canvases would be sufficient decoration for any studio; some large tables are covered with reference-books, sketches, catalogues and books uncut. He receives a good deal of literature, poems principally, with dedications. His neighbor “Gyp” always brings him her latest work. Only “Gyp” is as great a favorite as Maupassant, unlike the vaguely criticized “other writers who have that ‘assommant’ way of saying things one knows already.” Conversation with M. de Chavannes is like a Japanese room. Tempted by the charming things immediately under your notice you have a great desire to penetrate beyond the delicate walls that surround you. Suggestive silhouettes pass constantly behind the paper screen, and you long to know something more about them than a delicate outline. And yet it would be as impossible to hint at a wish to learn anything further than what you are told without asking, as to venture to poke an indiscreet finger through one of those paper doors. If the artist has been ‘un sauvage,’ he is 234 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

one to whom no social usage is a secret, and if he has shunned the world, it is probably because he has never cared to use it. Since possessing enough “fortune” not to have had to paint for one, and choosing to paint what has never made it necessary to conciliate society, he as little courts its attention as he evinces against it an aggressive indifference. When it calls upon him, he receives it with simple affability, but excepting his relationship with a few intimate friends, he reduces his social intercourse to the briefest courtesy an official position permits. Should people wonder how it comes to pass then that one to whom official receptions are not entertaining, and long official dinners incomparable to a simple meal for which he can himself compose the ‘menu,’ has chosen to hold an office that necessitates the acceptance of both these obligations, it must be again repeated that he has done it in the cause of Art. For even to himself it cannot but be obvious that no artist could better accomplish the duties of the President. And we need look no further for a reason than that his ambition is so far removed from the majority of other ambitions. “You have worked a little like the gods, alone and apart,” I once said to him. “But of all artists you have been the most fortunate, you have never had to make your ideas bend one centimeter.” “I don’t know how the gods work,” he smiled, and then added gravely, “I could never have given anything but the best that was in me.” When the Empress Frederick came to Paris and invited French artists to exhibit at Berlin, Puvis de Chavannes, failing to discover the same excuses as those who accepted, was amongst those who refused. His logic had explained the invitation, and his pride was too deep-rooted to be put aside by the force of public opinion. It was A Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood 235

not, however, from any arbitrary chauvinism. But, holding creeds, including a patriotic one, he would probably be ready to die for them – though the particular subtlety of his tact must always render this unnecessary. It is those who have made the request who feel they are wrong, and the critics who find themselves mistaken. Just as he is full of charm to the sympathetic, he faces short-sighted presumption with a glacial indifference, that while it never irritates conclusively resists. His art consists more in keeping away from pitfalls than in getting out of them; his wit, less in pyrotechnic brilliancy than in prudent reserve. It has a delightful “gray” quality, a delicate potency to affect your ideas about things permanently. Only it arrests attention rather than demands it, and you are always left to a flattering possibility of having made discoveries the artist was himself unconscious of. Monsieur de Chavannes is magnanimous, but you are convinced that his magnanimity is not merely the result of success, that the view he takes of things to-day he has always taken. In an age of opportunism, above all of literary and artistic opportunism, to have reached the pinnacle on which he stands while keeping his artistic conscience unspotted from the world, and without having once compromised his dignity by flattery or a personal concession to public curiosity, is to merit, as he has won, the homage of brother artists, the enthusiasm of his disciples, and the admiring incomprehension of people in general. Sometimes before such a man, with his fine disregard for personal advantage, one is tempted to brave modernity and return to a temporary belief in fixed principles – only it seems a belief one must be very great to be able to afford for long.

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Except when he wears the ‘sortie-de-bain’ it is not easy to say how the artist dresses, and I have forgotten his ‘menus,’ but I believe he delights in a pipe in private. He likes perfumes that are not “complicated” – the smell of ether and the smaller flowers. He likes street music when it is far away, and “Yes,” he said, “I adore one opera, I think it is by Rossini, but alas! I have forgotten its name. It is very beautiful.” His ideal of beauty is perhaps more English than French. One day a girl of sixteen came into his atelier to pose on approbation, but while undressing she hesitated apologetically. “Well, my child,” he said, “go on.” “Oh, but,” she answered, “I – I’m not finished.” “Not finished? Then let us see what is lacking.” “But I found a perfect jewel,” the artist declared laughing, and accentuating his opinion with his finger-tips on his lips. What the girl lacked is what he finds too much. De Chavannes studied to become an engineer just long enough to convince himself he was a painter, and to achieve that precision of expression and scientific thoroughness which were his father’s characteristics. For nothing irritated the latter more than what was vague, confused or half thought out; what could not be expressed with absolute clearness and conciseness. However, as an artist he soon stopped going to school to be told how he should look at things and what impressions he should receive. He would have no intermediary between himself and nature. So when he discovered what studying in an atelier meant, when Couture – to whom the atelier belonged – told his pupil he must only paint an object as he saw it through the eyes of his professor, and the pupil A Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood 237

found it impossible to see with any but his own, he took up his canvas and brushes and thenceforward worked alone. He does not insist upon the superiority of his plan, condemning all academic training. It is possible he may even think that to those who can be academically trained it makes very little difference whether they are so trained or not. Only personally he felt it would be useless. He must listen to nature herself, struggle alone with the meaning of her words, until at length an echo should come back to him from his canvas, and nature would recognize her voice as when the wind blows through some keen, sweet instrument. Of his first years of study in Italy the master always speaks as one might of an old and very dear romance. For it was there that he first began to understand Art as he was afterwards to worship her. Though no kindred of the Art imprisoned forever in the pictures of the old masters, except in that the same naiveté is hers, and earnestness and grace, the same serious beauty of the things that are to be beautiful forever. It is a modern art born in Italy, loving the simplicity of cool, white courts, the dignity of cypress trees, with the same intensity that it loves the dense groves of France, and gray-green stretches of field, clear, still pools and rivers, and, for its sadder moods, a landscape that looks like the skeleton of something exquisite. Puvis de Chavannes walks outside the strife of schools. While the Impressionists will tell you he is not “in it,” they will also confess there is no reason he should be. He has simply chosen a different route from the Whistlerian warpath, and from that sun-drenched high-road where artists cast blue and violet shadows he has wandered away alone to discover if haply he could find nature in another mood. He has succeeded, and out 238 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

of gratitude she answers him as a lover as well as a master. Since the death of a certain redoubtable critic, whose all-powerful opinion, until a painter became great enough to brave him or weakened enough to submit to his conditions of praise, was so seldom governed by his judgment and taste, the artist considers art criticism more calmly. Ruskin he knows as “Someone who has been spoken about by Monsieur Whistler, is it not so?” Still, it seemed that when I had the delightful privilege of bringing him all Zola’s enthusiasm as Zola had just expressed it to me, especially as that admiration had been previously tortured by the rival faction, it could not but have given him the distinctly pleasant satisfaction one great artist’s praise can give another. Zola had said that French feeling was undergoing a reaction in favor of idealism and religion, and that de Chavannes satisfied this need in the highest degree. He had the conviction of the old masters so often lacking in modern painters, their patience and joy in their work which replaced the futile modern cleverness. De Chavannes, however, doubts the capacity of anyone except a painter to criticize painting technically, while it is amongst painters that the most absolute bourgeois are sometimes to be found. We are left to our own conclusions. Personally the master never criticizes, at least I have never heard him, though he occasionally praises – Whistler, for example, Forain, Raffaelli with enthusiasm, the latter’s supreme interpretation of character, especially in a certain portrait of an old man with his grandson, where he has shown “that ‘bête’ pride of the grandfather for his offspring.” But no relationship with another artist has been more characteristic than his relationship with his predecessor as President, Meissonier. When Meissonier A Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood 239

died de Chavannes’ funeral oration was a prose poem in five lines, a single perfect flower thrown on the coffin. No deeper homage was ever paid the great worker of whom he speaks to-day as the “Menzel of France.” Nevertheless it was somewhat puzzling when the master remarked with smiling irritation, “Some artists would never be popular! What people want in painting is an object lesson,” he continued, “‘Is this an eye?’ ‘Yes, this is an eye.’ ‘Is this an arm?’ ‘Yes, this is an arm.’” It was difficult to believe he was in earnest when he appeared to underrate his achievement of having escaped popularity. Perhaps he was not. For while he has always felt he could afford to be simple, and must never have experienced the young artist’s dread of being understood, he must at the same time have realized that by his very simplicity he was sacrificing the possibility of that general unaffected comprehension and appreciation which the more complicatedly explicit and less spiritual may enjoy. His work always has been and will remain wrapt in the reserve of something essentially foreign from every point of view to the aesthetic and spiritual needs of the general public, those needs which find such large satisfaction in, let us say, the “Vièrge Consolatrice” of Bouguereau. De Chavannes’ saints, his “Orpheus” and his “Solitude,” can only console for what the Public have not yet suffered; his Religion breathes subtly though line and color and composition; his Realism has been purged of all its fleshly attributes. Humanity could attain to the ineffable grace, and calm, and wisdom, he attributes to it for decorative purposes, but it has not. So those who ask of Art to be a flattering repetition of their preconceptions, or a photograph of their daily life, the Public who make rendezvous with Religion in the corner of the market place, 240 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

pass on, in spirit at least. When the critics, puzzled and disturbed, attacked the artist’s work blindly, these same people did not even laugh at the painter of Elysian landscapes as they had laughed at the painter of “Le Bon Boc.” From a rough instinct which at times is so closely related to a subtler knowledge, they seemed to understand their darts could not reach the sky. The acceptance of de Chavannes’ first decorative work was decided by the happy chance of its exactly covering certain spaces in the recently completed Amiens museum, for which the architect had been commissioned by the Government to procure decorations. Finding de Chavannes had several, he was so well satisfied with their – fit, he took them at once. The Government was none the less satisfied with the artist’s conditions, and as he in turn felt more in need of artistic liberty than pecuniary appreciation, he has since painted almost exclusively for the State. In the case of Puvis de Chavannes the State has proved a peculiarly agreeable taskmaster. Its remuneration may have been small, but then its criticisms have been few, if any, and the artist has worked on in enviable peace. Marseilles, Lyons, Orléans and Poitiers, Rouen, Paris and Amiens hold his decorations in museum, town hall, and university. There is something suggestive of the artistic patriotism of the early Italians in thus devoting himself so entirely to his own country. “I have given it my best effort, and all my life – which is to say a great many years,” the artist added smiling. It is therefore a compliment worthy of Boston that he should have consented to let her possess his first decoration not destined for his own country, and alone the felicity with which the subject has been chosen prevents it from seeming like an infidelity to France. Before he had finally decided A Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood 241

upon the subject of his painting he happened to pass a summer evening at the Cirque d’Été, where at one moment the circus ring was draped in black, and a woman in flowing white rode on a black-draped horse and danced a Grecian dance. Then suddenly she floated up into the air, a silver light full upon her against the dark background. “It was something of all beauty,” the artist said, which was true. “The Muses Hailing Genius, Messenger of Light,” has as much to do with all countries in general as the cliffs they hardly touch with their feet, the sea beyond, and the topaz sky. American landscape has not been idealized, nor have American heroes been honored. Merely one of the loveliest decorations America will ever possess has come from France. For Puvis de Chavannes loves his native land with the intense and exclusive devotion of a man who has helped to make it great. He has reflected her most exquisite moods, amplified her suggestions of beauty, pictured her bravest pages in history, her arts, and industries, and heroes, from the Lance Throwers in the Fields of Picardy to Sainte Geneviève, from Charles Martel to Victor Hugo offering his lyre to the City of Paris personified by the loveliest of women, and surrounded by allegorical illustrations of her virtues and attributes. “More perhaps than are hers,” remarked the artist, “but I give them to her all the same.” It is a marvelous series of decorations, this Triumphal March from Amiens in the North to Marseilles, the Gate of the East. Nothing at all approaches it in modern art. And there is a whole fascinating study in marking the evolution of the painter’s genius from the early work in the Amiens museum, “War” and “Peace,” still somewhat overheated and not quite free from all Couture would have liked his pupil to profess, to the Victor 242 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

Hugo decorations, bathed in an atmosphere one would delight to breathe forever, painted against the sky itself, and of such perfect simplicity there is not even a flower in excess. The museum of Amiens is ‘tout de ma main,’ de Chavannes says lovingly, and when one finds the decorations of other artists, however excellent, in necessarily discordant proximity, one appreciates his choice of a staircase, when he cannot have a hall as in the Sorbonne, or a room apart as well as a staircase as in the Paris Hôtel de Ville. Why he was not given all the Panthéon to decorate is answered neither by unconvincing brutality on the one hand, nor a classical chromo on the other. But how rarely wonderful it would have been if the other saints had had the good fortune of Sainte Geneviève, it makes one inconsolable to reflect. Though every last work of the master is pronounced his best, exception must be made for the Sainte Geneviève legend, where the story is told with such wise simplicity, such charming restraint and graceful strength, it might be the Saint’s dream of her life that she is permitted to dream forever as her reward. Perhaps one of de Chavannes’ greatest charms as a painter is his supreme mastery of tone, in composition as well as in color. And this is especially remarkable in his easel pictures. The sea prays with the “Poor Fisherman,” the ragged woods repent with the “Prodigal Son,” and every echo of music has left the earth for “Orpheus.” There is a certain personal note too in these smaller pictures, a note of sudden, sharp sadness, an echo rather from moments of infinite discouragement, of which no one hears until – afterwards, when they have become something beautiful to the eyes and a consolation to the mind.

A Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood 243

“But do you never rest?” I once asked M. de Chavannes. “When I work,” he answered. “I have tried other things, but I have never found anything rest me more.” And in winter from eight till dusk, in summer starting out even earlier from the Place Pigalle to Neuilly miles away, the artist works incessantly. “The time is short, and I have much to finish, and many things will remain unfinished.” There is something almost too intimate to speak of in this tense, inexhaustible labor, this fine struggle for the adequate expression of so much that must not perish. Time and seasons and physical considerations have ceased to count for anything with the artist. I have seen him in midsummer, a merciless heat beating down over everything and an army of persistent flies interrupting each brush-stroke, but not conceding a moment to exhaustion. To talk with Puvis de Chavannes in the gray atelier of the Place Pigalle, and to linger for a space in the garden of pale-toned flowers at Neuilly, is to lose one’s self in one of the painter’s Dreams, those Dreams which fall like wonderfully wrought curtains between us and the sadness of the world. Lily Lewis Rood

244 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

Notes to Part Three 1 In Duncan’s A Social Departure, the narrator relates a story of how “we” rode on the cowcatcher (much as Lady MacDonald, the prime minister’s wife, had recently done with much accompanying publicity) and one of the illustrations in the novel shows two young women riding on the front of the train. Lloyd’s admission modestly corrects the misconception. 2 Lloyd’s story about Taro San and the Frenchman’s daughter resembles a similar situation described in Isabella Bird’s Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880) too closely to be coincidental. Garth Grafton’s earlier comment that “Miss Bird” (as well as “Mr. Loti”) was “among [them]” on the steamer corroborates the connection. Lloyd’s sketch of Taro San thus clearly illustrates the often permeable boundaries separating fiction and travel journalism at this time. See Kröller, “first Impressions,” for a discussion of Bird’s treatment of her servant, Ito, and Martin, “Discovering Lily Lewis” [129-31], for a more comprehensive discussion of Lewis’s apparent “borrowing” from Bird’s text. In a corresponding discussion about attitudes towards mixed marriages, Garth Grafton writes about “a certain kind of foreigner” who, “had [he] a sister or a daughter, he would rather see her in a shroud than attired for a Japanese wedding” (“Foreign Wives”). 3 “Hara kiri,” often even more incorrectly heard by European ears as “hari kari.” 4 The Japanese would call Fujiyama “Fujisan” (using the Chinese character for “mountain”). 5 I cannot find this word in a Japanese dictionary. 6 By “planet pilgrims,” Lloyd seems to be referring to people who travel in order to learn about foreign places, but who obtain most of their information about the places they visit from their compatriots. 7 A subject recurring often in both Lloyd’s and Grafton’s accounts is the role of women in the countries they visit, reminiscent of the frequent, but by no means exclusive, focus on women in the early journalism of both writers. The Indian woman that Lloyd “misses” contrasts, in her absence, with the two

A Selection of Sketches by Lily Lewis Rood 245

women described in her Japanese accounts, O Mitsu San, the traditional geisha, and the “little maid,” Tomi, ever anxious, like Taro San, to learn western tongues and western ways.

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Appendices

Appendix A Lily Lewis Rood: Chronology 1866 or 1867: Born in Montreal. Raised and educated in Montreal, institution(s) unknown. January 1886–October 1886: Paris correspondent for The Week, writing as “L.L.” November 1886–June 1887: Wrote columns for The Week describing a tour of Switzerland and Italy, writing as “L.L.” November 1887–October 1888: Wrote “Montreal Letter” column for The Week as “Louis Lloyd.” September 1888–May 1889: Travelled around the world with Canadian writer Sara Jeannette Duncan. Wrote articles describing the tour for The Week as “Louis Lloyd.” Summer 1889: Moved to Paris. Published sketches describing the Paris Exposition and other events in The Week and the Montreal Daily Star as “Louis Lloyd.” 1891: Published sketches of “Parisian Personages“ in the Pall Mall Gazette and other British and American periodicals as “Louis Lloyd.” 23 April 1891: Married American artist Roland Rood in London.

249

Between 1891 and 1898: Travelled up the Nile with a Russian princess residing in Paris, and published an article describing this trip in a French journal (not found). 1895: Published an article in an American art journal and a monograph about French artist Pierre Puvis de Chavannes as “Lily Lewis Rood.” 1896: Published two prose poems in the New York Bookman as “Lily Lewis Rood.” 1896–1899: Estranged from family in Montreal. 1899: Divorced from Roland Rood. 1914: Faced charges in a London court regarding a series of accusatory letters. Hospitalized in Manor Asylum, Epsom, England. February 1915: Transferred to Broadmoor Asylum, Crowthorne, England. May 1915: Transferred to Coton Hill Hospital, Stafford, England. Sometime prior to 1926: Transferred to Camberwell House Asylum, Surrey, England. 5 October 1929: Died. At the time of her death, was a voluntary patient at Camberwell House. October 1929: Body returned to Montreal and buried in the John Lewis family plot, Mount Royal Cemetery, Montreal.

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Appendix B Letters (The letters included in Appendix B have been transcribed precisely as they appear in the originals, without correction of errors in spelling, capitalization, punctuation, or grammar; “[sic]” denotes spelling errors and is my addition.) A tr a nscr ipt of a l ett er from S a r a Jea n n ett e D u nca n to Ca pta in L a nsing L ew is , 1888:

Vancouver B.C. Oct. 12th. Dear Captain Lewis, At last we have arrived, as it’s quite unnecessary to say – both well and in excellent spirits for the sea trip. Lily was rather upset at the Glacier where we got off for a day, but is quite herself again now. I don’t think the North West air altogether agreed with her. She has just got her mail and is reading your letter aloud to me. Many thanks for my part of the message which I appreciate – “Napanee” notwithstanding. We have enjoyed everything hugely, and nothing more than Winnipeg where your goodness, and that of the “benign bachelorhood of the Shanty” made a deep and lasting impression. I do hope the Shanty won’t object to what I said in the Star. Please intercede for me if it should be so. We were met here by Lily’s uncle who has been very kind, as has also the manager of the 251

“Vancouver,” who happens to know Mr. Lewis in Montreal and has given us a very gorgeous suite of rooms in consequence. Mr. Luxton shall have series – Finally we have been “interviewed” here – think of it! With kindest regards and sincere gratitude, Sara J. Duncan

A

tr a nscr ipt of a l ett er from

h er fa m ily,

L ily L ew is

to

1889 :

Kandy Ceylon February 1st, 1889. And so we have come to Ceylon and Kandy. I have just arrived here from Colombo, Garth having gone on before yesterday. Oh! It is such a paradise this Island, so intoxicating with its palms, groves, its wild flowers which are Garden ones at home, its mountains and its valleys where vegitation [sic] has gone mad. – If I only had money and leisure. As it is my letters are engrossing me to such an extent that all the beauty of India cannot compensate me for the lack of a smile – The fact of the matter is, should my work not be successful well I think of you when I take my morning plunge – a daily necessity in these climes; when I buy the most luxurious bananas in the world for 2 cents per dozen; when I revel in the warm, sweet smelling air, and grow quite tipsy over all the beauty. The English are much nicer than they are at Home or on the Continent it requires all the heat of the tropics to show etcetera everyone is very kind, especially with Garth she has an exceedingly taking way which makes everybody like her I am resigned to coming in for the extra beams. Of course I can console myself by saying G. is 27 252 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

and I am 22 and she has much more experience, etc. etc. but all the same I don’t get on with the crowd. Now & again some rare soul finds out my trunk Valise and follows me about like a slate [sic] or offers to pay my passage from Japan to Paris, but the masses remain cold. I’m sorry. It can’t be helped. Je me resign. I can scarcely wait for tomorrows mail which is to arrive from Yokohama by the French steamer and which we asked the C.P.R. Agent to send on to Colombo. Oh! I wish you were here, here amidst all this loveliness, drinking in the peace and calm you deserve so many thousand more times than I do. But, dear ones, ne m’en voulez pas. I am simply tortured with anxiety about my work, for think of it, should it fail, what a ridiculous selfish creature I shall have been having accomplished nothing. How is Albert? tell him from me that he is a gilt edge brick. You cannot imagine how proud I was when a brother who could write me such a letter as his last. It was so kind, so thoughtful, so generous and if I fail to show him I am worth his thoughts. – We start for Calcutta on Wednesday and shall spend the ten days we intend stopping there on Board ship and save Hotel Bills. I really don’t think that if we return home without misfortune the tour of the World will ever have been made more cheaply. Think of it. 169 Mexican Dollars paid out and we shall have seen the Kobe and Wagasallin in Japan, Hong Kong in China, Singapore and Penang in the Malay Peninsula, Colombo and Kandy in Ceylon, Calcutta, Delhi, and Bombay in India, and if our mites will only last – Cairo and Malta, besides Adan & Port Said. I have been forced to buy a thin dress which is to cost $2.55 tout compris. APPENDICES 253

Sunday Morning. I dreamed last night that not one of my letters had appeared in the “Week.” This hotel is the sweetest we have stopped at and gives one an excellent idea of what kind of people travel in India for their pleasure. There is Lord Montague the father of the young man who crossed with us and there is another English Milord. A French Counte sat opposite me at dinner and stared so that I felt tempted to say – “Vous Desirey Monsieur” People can’t get over our travelling alone this way, but it is a very jolly way, for despite a little tall language between us when something has disagreed with Garth, or my work has gone badly, We have lots of fun. This statement seems rather a contradiction of what I said yesterday – It isn’t though. Yesterday I saw everything tout noir. We take four O’clock tea this afternoon with a Presbyterian gentleman who is very well known here, and tomorrow, breakfast somewhere else. We have hopes that Lord Lansdowne may do something for us in Calcutta. He ought to, but we are not to be sangunine. We found the Complete Angler at the Hotel on our arrival. It is really exceedingly pleasant to meet the funny old codger everywhere we go. He is so comical with his great white India hat lined with green, and looks exactly like a big fat Daduader’s toad stool. Americans with all their faults, American men, are really after all the nicest one meets. Englishmen as Ella says are eternally trying to find you out, to surprise you into some compromising remark. And dont you often meet objectionable people? “Two young ladies travelling alone must have so much to put up with” This from anna Britisher to Garth. “Yes she replied” we do meet objectionable people – sometimes. 254 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

Later. We have been for such a lovely drive all through the Gardens, past the Market with its piles of tempting fruit, its handsome vendors, past the little miserable mole-Hills of the people. Our steamer leaves on Wednesday for Calcutta. I have sent the Photos of which I spoke. Please give my kindest regards to Mrs Madam Herdt, mesdamrs Conn, veus the Coussirats, Mrs. Roe and carpenter and Judge Bobey & redpath and Janie C; Also to Gregor & Taylor, Ella W: & Lettie H: if you see them. Good Bye. Garth sends her love; a great deal from me. Lillie.

A

tr a nscr ipt of a l ett er from

h er fa m ily,

L ily L ew is

to

1889 :

Chowringhee, Calcutta. Dearest ones, I have so many wonderful and nice things to tell you that I don’t know where to begin. First in Ceylon every body was very kind. At Kandy we took tiffin with a planter who said that if we were only going to remain longer he would invite us to spend a week at his house. Then at the Kandy Hotel our old friend The Complete Angler turned up once again. The Colombo “Observer” a newspaper whose Editor we went to see wrote something very pleasant about us to the effect that all his patrons who were good to two lady correspondents at present amongst them would be doing the “Observer” a favour. The funniest result of this occurred in a Railway Carriage where an Englishman surprised us by offering his rug APPENDICES 255

without having gone through the formality of being introduced – looking after our Luggage, Buying our Tickets, and then remarking that we were the ladies, weren’t we, to whom the “Observer” had told the people of Ceylon to be kind. – We took six days to come up from Ceylon to Calcutta the trip was pleasant as we met on Board our Steamer the “Coromandel” one Mrs. Norris the wife of Chief Justice Norris of Calcutta. Once arrived our first step at Garth’s suggestion was to go to two of the leading Newspapers here, present a specimen of our work and get them to print it if possible. This would at once attract the attention of Calcutta people, and what was more to the point the attention of His Excellency the Viceroy. Garth went to the “Englishman” a pro European paper, and presented her letters of introduction and her mss. I went to the “Statesman” a pro-native paper, and presented my mss and my card. The Editor received me most kindly, said he wished his house were larger and he would invite us to stop with him, etc: etc:. I left my mss with little hope however of hearing anything more about it. To my surprise it appeared next morning in the form you see in the paper I forward. Garth’s letter came out next day. The “Statesman” people have asked me for more work – and last evening Garth and I dined there, and we dine there again on Monday evening. The next event in our lives was the invitation of Mrs. Norris, the Judge’s wife, to dine. She gave us a regular dinner-party. très chic, oh! mais très chic. Mrs. Norris came out dressed in the gorgeous apparel in which she had been presented last year at the Queens drawing Room; Garth wore a pink dress, and I my blue silk. The table was exquisite. A bit of soft-tinted brocade lay in the middle and countless low vases of white flowers and foliage plants recalled its 256 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

colours charmingly. There were nine guests, six men, Mrs. Norris, and ourselves. The servants in spotless white with white turbans made a very picturesque effect indeed. On our return from the dinner-party Garth found a letter for her from the Viceroy written with his own hand. She had previously sent him a note, a very nice note indeed, apprizing him of our arrival, saying how unexpected our coming to India was, and that as a consequence we were utterly without introductions of any kind. His ex’s reply was most kind. The following day we received a formal invitation to dine at Government House at the Wednesday evening private dinner party. Then was there a grave question and a skirmish – What should we wear? My blue Silk was out of the question for so swell an occasion, and so were Garth’s frocks. We decided upon two Silks, pale pink Indian one for me and a pale green for Garth. So upon the evening of the 20th of February A.D. 1889 we, two “literary cusses,” with nothing to back us but our work, alighted at the door of his Ex: The Viceroy of India. Picture Garth in a dress with short sleeves, pointed neck, and full long train, and me in the loveliest frock I ever possessed – Directoire style, low necked and half sleeves, I wore only Moses’ jewellery the ring she gave me and the pin and bracelet. Garth and I looked “epatante.” We were ushered past native servants who stood like statues, and into a softly lit drawing room. There we were received by two Aides with hushed solemnity. It was a trying moment. A quarter of an hour passed, the other guests arrived and then one of the Aides threw us all into a state of trepidation by announcing “Their Excellencies.” APPENDICES 257

Lord Lansdowne came first and was followed by Lady Lansdowne. Each shook hands with the guests as their names were announced. Soon afterwards we went down to dinner. Sapristi, quelle splendeur. The dishes were laid in a bed of dark red roses. The plates were of silver and the glass ware sparkled again. I sat next to Sir Donald M, Wallace, Lord Dufferin’s Private Secretary, and was taken down to dinner by – of course I dont know whom. He was an interesting old fossil, but I doubt whether he appreciated my free and easy treatment of him. After dinner the ladies retired to the drawingroom. Lady Lansdowne spoke first to Garth and then came to me. I acquitted myself very creditably. Her excellency walked off after a short pleasant conversation about Canada, and then I had a very jolly talk with Major Rowan Hamilton, Lady Dufferin’s brother. Meanwhile Lord L: conversed with Garth, and afterwards sat down beside me. I was quite terrified; Garth had so worked me up by expatiating upon his formality, and the horrible snubbing which awaited the too-forward that I was almost afraid to answer him. – Fortunately people rose to go in the midst of our conversation, and I was relieved. I have forgotten to say that the Englishman’s Editor also gave Garth and myself a dinner. After the dinner at Government House we went to a Ball given by a very high official here. One could scarcely tell where the House ended and the Garden began. There were delicious nooks lighted by fairy lamps and filled with tropical plants. There were cool verandas leading out upon Lantern Studded lawns; and there was a Ball Room with shelves about it packed with Bengal roses – I danced, mes chers amis, I in a low-necked

258 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

dress and dancing – and I didn’t dance badly either. The Thursday after the Ball we went to drive with Mrs. Norris. Friday we dined with the Knights. Saturday we lunched with Mrs. N: and went at five o’clock to the House of one Mrs. Grant. Sunday we spent entirely with Mrs. N: and today Monday, we look forward to a very busy week indeed. Of course I have not been able to get my letters from Colombo as we told the P.O. Agents to keep them till our return. Now we are going across county to Bombay, so that we shall not get any news from home for three weeks yet, having been in all nearly Three Months without a single line from Canada. I need not tell you how I long and long to hear how you are, how I wish and wish you could see what I am seeing; how I would give anything to be allowed to chatter to you in propia persona. This screv is meant for everybody, I know the separate and individual members of my family will not expect a separate and distinct address, but will believe me devoted to all. Lillie.

P.S. overPlease be careful to whom you show the newspaper I forward, as I am sending the Taro San Article to our Syndicate, and it may not have appeared before this reaches you. Of course if they, the Syndicate see it in another paper they would be furious.

APPENDICES 259

Bibliography Works

by L ily L ewis R ood L.L., [Lily Lewis Rood]. “From Paris to Switzerland.” The Week 4 Nov. 1886: 780. ———. “Letter from Italy.” The Week 6 Jan. 1887: 88, 3 Feb. 1887: 152–53, 17 Feb. 1887: 185, 3 Mar. 1887: 215–16, 7 Apr. 1887: 299–300. ———. “Letter from Rome.” The Week 21 Apr. 1887: 334–35, 12 May 1887: 380, 2 June 1887: 429, 9 June 1887: 444. ———. “Notes on News From Paris.” The Week 30 Dec. 1886: 3–4. ———. “Our Letter from Switzerland.” The Week 11 Nov. 1886: 797–98, 2 Dec. 1886: 4. ———. “A Paris Pension.” The Week 6 May 1886: 365–66. ———. “Our Paris Letter.” The Week 11 Feb. 1886: 166–67, 25 Mar. 1886: 260, 15 Apr. 1886: 309, 22 Apr. 1886: 328, 13 May 1886: 382, 27 May 1886: 414–15, 10 June 1886: 447, 8 July 1886: 509, 22 July 1886: 542, 5 Aug. 1886: 572, 26 Aug. 1886: 621–22, 23 Sept. 1886: 684, 28 Oct. 1886: 765. ———. “Paul Bert.” The Week 7 Apr. 1887: 301. Lloyd, Louis, [Lily Lewis Rood]. “Anacreontic.” The Week 4 Oct. 1888: 715. ———. “By Lantern Light: A Japanese Sketch.” The Week 21 June 1889: 476–77. ———. “Bull Fights in Paris.” Montreal Daily Star 31 Aug. 1889: 3.

261

———. “Concerning Religion in Japan, and Something about Buddha.” The Week 5 July 1889: 485–86. ———. “The French Exhibit.” Montreal Daily Star 20 July 1889: 8. ———. “From the French of François Coppée.” The Week 10 Nov. 1887: 807. ———. “From New York.” The Week 29 Mar. 1888: 284–85, 3 May 1888: 263–64. ———. “Glimpses of Old Paris.” Montreal Daily Star 3 Aug. 1889: 2. ———. “An Incident By the Sea.” The Week 27 Dec. 1889: 633. ———. “In Holiday Attire.” Montreal Daily Star 8 June 1889: 3. ———. “Letters from Japan: Sayonara.” The Week 9 Aug. 1889: 567–68. ———. “Louis Lloyd’s Letter.” The Week 14 Dec. 1888: 23– 24, 28 Dec. 1888: 54–55, 11 Jan. 1889: 88, 18 Jan. 1889: 103, 15 Mar. 1889: 232, 7 June 1889: 421–22. ———. “Louis Lloyd’s Letter: Arrival in Tokyo.” The Week 25 Jan. 1889: 119–20. ———. “Louis Lloyd’s Letter: Continued Efforts to Study the Native Life of the People, and Where We Landed.” The Week 22 Feb. 1889: 183. ———. “Louis Lloyd’s Letters.” The Week 11 Oct. 1888: 733– 34, 18 Oct. 1888: 749–50, 25 Oct. 1888: 763–65. ———. “Looking Back.” The Week 28 Mar. 1890: 266. ———. “Montreal Letter.” The Week 10 Nov. 1887: 807, 17 Nov. 1887: 819, 22 Dec. 1887: 55, 29 Dec. 1887: 70, 12 Jan. 1888: 103, 19 Jan. 1888: 119, 26 Jan. 1888: 135, 2 Feb. 1888: 152–53, 9 Feb. 1888: 169–70, 16 Feb. 1888: 183–84, 23 Feb. 1888: 200, 1 Mar. 1888: 215–16, 9 Mar. 1888: 169– 70, 15 Mar. 1888: 246–47, 29 Mar. 1888: 284–85, 10 May 1888: 379–80, 17 May 1888: 394–95, 24 May 1888: 410, 31 May 1888: 426, 7 June 1888: 442, 14 June 1888: 459, 21 June 1888: 476–77, 28 June 1888: 489, 5 July 1888: 508, 12 July 1888: 526, 19 July 1888: 540–41, 26 July 1888: 554–55, 2 Aug. 1888: 572, 9 Aug. 1888: 587, 23 Aug. 1888: 618, 6 Sept. 1888: 652, 18 Sept. 1888: 668. ———. “Native Talent Abroad: Some Canadian Artists in Paris.” Montreal Daily Star 15 July 1889: 4. ———. “Parisian Personages III: The Princess Gortschakoff.” Pall Mall Gazette 19 Nov. 1890: 3.

262 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

———. “Parisian Personalities: M. de Blowitz chez lui.” Pall Mall Gazette 28 Aug. 1890: 2. ———. “Parisian Personalities II: The Artist fin de siècle – M. Van Beer’s Atelier.” Pall Mall Gazette 19 Sept. 1890: 1. ———. “Parisian Statues.” Montreal Daily Star 16 Oct. 1889: 3. ———. “Parisian Topics.” The Week 20 Sept. 1889: 664. ———. “Popular Parisian Topics.” The Week 6 Sept. 1889: 633–34. ———. “A Sunday in Calcutta.” The Week 14 Feb. 1890: 166–67. ———. “Taro San: Our Official Friend.” The Week 7 June 1889: 421–22. ———. “A Wigwam in Paris.” Montreal Daily Star 27 July 1889: 3. Rood, Lily Lewis. “The Face in the Mirror.” The Bookman [New York] 4.4 (1896): 322–23. ———. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes: A Sketch/ Lily Lewis Rood. Boston: Prang, 1895. ———. “Puvis de Chavannes as a Painter of the Seasons and Some Allegories.” Modern Art (autumn 1895): 107–08. ———. “A Perfume.” The Bookman [New York] 4.4 (1896): 323.

S econdary Works C ited

or C onsulted Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings/ Matthew Arnold. Ed. Stephan Collini. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. Ardis, Ann. New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1990. ART. “Canadian Artists at the Paris Salon.” The Week, 3 July 1891: 496. Baugh, Albert C. A Literary History of England. 2nd ed. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967. Berger, Carl. The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism 1867–1914. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970. Bergonzi, Bernard. 1973. The Turn of a Century: Essays on Victorian and Modern English Literature. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1974. Bird, Isabella. Unbeaten Tracks in Japan. 1879. London: Virago, 1984.

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Bjorhovde, Gerd. Rebellious Structures: Women Writers and the Crisis of the Novel, 1800–1900. Oslo: Norwegian U P, 1987. Buckler, William E. Walter Pater: The Critic as Artist of Ideas. New York: New York UP, 1987. “Catherine Simpson Hayes.” Herstory Calendar. Saskatoon, SK: Herstory Calendar Collective, 1979. Cook, Ramsey. The Regenerators: Social Criticism in LateVictorian English Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985. “Coton Hill Asylum.” Rossbret. 29 Mar. 2003. . Dean, Misao. Introduction. A Daughter of Today. By Sara Jeannette Duncan. 1894. Ed. Misao Dean. Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1988. i–xxi. Duncan, Sara Jeannette. A Daughter of Today. London: Chatto and Windus, 1894. ———. “From Egypt to England.” Montreal Daily Star 3 June 1890: 3. ———. “Outworn Literary Methods.” The Week 9 June 1887: 450–51. ———. A Social Departure: How Orthodocia and I Went Round the World By Ourselves. New York: Appleton, 1890. ———. “Special Correspondence of the Star.” Montreal Daily Star, 12, 20 Dec.1889, 4, 11, 25 Jan., 1, 15 Feb., 17 May 1890. F. H. “Some Paris Ateliers.” The Week 1 Nov. 1889: 761. Fiamengo, Janice. “‘Even in this Canada of Ours’: Suffering, Sympathy, and Social Justice in Late-Victorian Canadian Social Reform Discourse.” Diss., University of British Columbia, 1996. Fink, Lois Marie. American Art at the Nineteenth-Century Paris Salons. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. Fisher, Susan. “‘Our Next Neighbour Across the Way’: Japan and Canadian Writers.” Canadian Literature 174 (autumn 2002): 29–48. Flynn, Kevin. “Destination Nation: Nineteenth-Century Travels Aboard the Canadian Pacific Railway.” Essays on Canadian Writing 67 (spring 1999): 190–222. Fowler, Marian. Redney: A Life of Sara Jeannette Duncan. Toronto: Anansi, 1983.

264 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

Francis, Daniel. The Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp, 1992. Frawley, Maria. A Wider Range: Travel Writing by Women in Victorian England. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1994. Gerson, Carole. “Anthologies and the Canon of Early Canadian Women Writers.” McMullen 55–76. ———. “Canadian Writers and Internationalism in LateVictorian Canada.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada, Saskatoon, SK, October 2004. ———. A Purer Taste: The Writing and Reading of Fiction in English in Nineteenth-Century Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989. ———. “Wild Colonial Girls: New Women of the Empire, 1883–1901.” Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 3.1 (1995): 61–77. Gerson, Carole, and Veronica Strong-Boag. Paddling Her Own Canoe: The Times and Texts of E. Pauline Johnson/ Tekahionwake. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. Good, Graham. The Observing Self: Rediscovering the Essay. London: Routledge, 1988. Grafton, Garth, [Sara Jeannette Duncan]. “The Bones of Jyeasu.” Montreal Daily Star 21 Mar. 1889: 2. ———. “Cow-Catcher Comments.” Montreal Daily Star 3 Nov. 1889: 2. ———. “Foreign Wives.” Montreal Daily Star 9 Mar. 1889: 2. ———. “Interviewing in Japan.” Montreal Daily Star 19 Jan. 1889: 3. ———. “A Japanese Snowstorm.” Montreal Daily Star 27 Apr. 1889: 3. ———. “The Men of Moosomin.” Montreal Daily Star 20 Oct. 1888: 3. ———. “Over the Pacific Ocean.” Montreal Daily Star 22 Dec. 1888: 3. ———. “Regina and Its People.” Montreal Daily Star 27 Oct. 1888: 2. ———. “The Sad City By the Sea.” Montreal Daily Star 10 Nov. 1888: 2. ———. “Shopping in Japan.” Montreal Daily Star 16 Mar. 1889: 2.

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———. “Special Correspondence of the Star.” Montreal Daily Star 14, 26 Jan., 5 Feb., 1, 18 Mar., 3, 6 Apr., 29 June, 6, 13, 27 July, 31 Aug., 16, 30 Oct., 2, 13, 20 Nov., 20 Dec. 1889. ———. “They Go to Tokio.” Montreal Daily Star 14 Jan. 1889: 1. ———. “Winnipeg Whisperings.” Montreal Daily Star 6 Oct. 1888: 2. Gwyn, Sandra. The Private Capital: Ambition and Love in the Age of MacDonald and Laurier. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1984. Hammill, Faye. “Round the World Without a Man: Sara Jeannette Duncan’s A Social Departure.” The Yearbook of English Studies 34 (2004): 112–26. Heaps, Denise A. “Genre and Gender in Sara Jeannette Duncan’s Travel Satire, A Social Departure: How Orthodocia and I Went Round the World By Ourselves.” Canadian Literature 173 (summer 2002): 95–112. Heilbrun, Carolyn. Writing a Woman’s Life. New York: Ballantine, 1988. “How Two Young Ladies Went Round the World.” Review of A Social Departure: How Orthodocia and I Went Round the World By Ourselves, by Sara Jeannette Duncan. Pall Mall Gazette, 11 July 1890. James, Henry. “Florentine Notes.” Italian Hours. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909. 3–40. ———. “Venice.” Italian Hours 391–427. Jameson, Anna. Legends of the Madonna. 1852. 5th ed. London: Longmans, 1872. Jones, Alice. “Florentine Vignettes.” The Week 5 Feb. 1891. ———. “Nile Vignettes.” The Week 10, 26 July, 2, 9 Aug. 1895. ———. “Stray Thoughts in Venice.” The Week 29 May 1891. Kadar, Marlene. “Coming to Terms: Life Writing – From Genre to Critical Practice.” Introduction. Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice. Ed. Marlene Kadar. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. 3–16. Kröller, Eva-Marie. Canadian Travellers in Europe, 1851– 1900. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1987. ———. “First Impressions: Rhetorical Strategies in Travel Writing By Victorian Women.” Ariel 1.4 (1990): 87–99. Lang, Marjory. Women Who Made the News: Female Journalists in Canada 1880–1945. Montreal and

266 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

Kingston; London; Ithaca, NY: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999. “Lansing L. M. Lewis, D.C.L.” Prominent People in the Province of Quebec in Professional, Social, and Business Life, 1923–24. Montreal: The Biographical Society of Canada, Ltd., 1923–24. “Lansing Lewis Worthy Citizen Laid to Rest.” Montreal Herald, 26 Mar. 1927: 3. “Lewis, Herbert Mostyn McKim.” Who’s Who in Canada. Toronto: International Press, 1980–81. 576–77. “Lewis, Lansing.” A Standard Dictionary of Canadian Biography: The Canadian Who Was Who. Ed. Charles G. D. Roberts and Arthur L. Tunnell. Toronto: TransCanada, 1934. 303–5. Loti, Pierre [Julien Vaudi]. Madame Chrysanthéme. Paris: Calmann Levy, 1888. Martin, Margaret Kathleen. “Discovering Lily Lewis: A Canadian Journalist and New Woman.” Diss., University of Saskatchewan, 2001. McKillop, A. B. A Disciplined Intelligence: Critical Inquiry and Canadian Thought in the Victorian Era. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1979. McMullen, Lorraine. Introduction. McMullen 1–4. ———. ed. Re(dis)covering Our Foremothers: NineteenthCentury Women Writers. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1991. Morgan, Henry. The Canadian Men and Women of the Time: A Handbook of Canadian Biography. Toronto: Briggs, 1898. ———. The Canadian Men and Women of the Time: A Handbook of Canadian Biography of Living Characters. Toronto: Briggs, 1912. ———. Types of Canadian Women and of Women who Are or Have Been Connected with Canada. Toronto: W. Briggs, 1903. Mitford, Mary Russel. Our Village. 1824–39. London: Dent, 1936. Mount, Nick. “In Praise of Talking Dogs: The Study and Teaching of Canada’s Canonless Canon.” Essays on Canadian Writing 63 (spring 1998): 76–98. New, W.H. A History of Canadian Literature. London: MacMillan, 1989. Parker, Gilbert. “Canadian Art Students in Paris.” The Week 1 Jan. 1892: 70.

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“Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.” The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 12. 4 Nov. 2004. . Price, Aimée Brown. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. New York: Rizzoli, 1994. Ready, Kathryn. “Sara Jeannette Duncan’s A Daughter of Today: Nineteenth-Century Canadian Literary Feminism and the Fin de siècle Magic-Picture Story.” Canadian Literature 173 (summer 2002): 95–112. Roberts, Charles G. D., and Arthur L. Tunnell, eds. A Standard Dictionary of Canadian Biography: The Canadian Who Was Who. Toronto: Trans-Canada, 1934. Routhier, Adolfe-Basile. A travers l’Europe: impressions et passages. Québec: Delisle, 1881. “Seeing the Country.” Regina Leader 9 Oct. 1888: 1. Showalter, Elaine. Daughters of Decadence: Women Writers of the Fin de Siècle. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1993. Stein, Richard L. The Ritual of Interpretation: The Fine Arts as Literature in Ruskin, Rossetti, and Pater. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1975. Swinglehurst, Edmund. Cook’s Tours: The Story of Popular Travel. Poole, Dorset: Blanford, 1982. Tausky, Thomas. Sara Jeannette Duncan, Novelist of Empire. Port Credit: P.D. Meany, 1980. Unrau, John. Ruskin and St. Mark’s. London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1984. Ward, Mrs. Humphrey. Robert Elsmere. London: Smith and Ellor, 1888. Warner, Charles Dudley. Studies in the South and West with Comments on Canada. New York: Harper, 1889. Who’s Who in Canada. Toronto: International Press, 1980– 81.

268 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

Index A Americans, comments on, 69, 168, 254 architecture, Italian, 12, 46, 141, 143–44 Archives nationales du Québec, 8 Ardis, Ann, 93 art and Americans, 154 Canadian, 58, 215–20 criticism, 44–46, 53, 140, 154, 239–40 Japanese, 200–201 neglected, 16–17 Lewis Rood’s interest in, 12, 57–58, 89, 93–94 Salons, 4, 5, 93, 216, 231–33 value of, 16–17, 30, 44–47, 57, 154 artists, interest in Benson, Frank W., 154 Brymner, 13, 83, 122, 149–51 Canadian, 17, 216–20 and Princess Gortschakoff, 222, 226 Loti, Pierre, 200 Puvis de Chavannes, 89, 93–94, 231–44 Tarbell, Edmund C., 154 See also under individual artists A travers l’Europe (Routhier), 30

B Banff Hotel, 169 Bate, Katherine (wife of Lansing), 60, 100, 108, 117n. 46 Bell, Mary, 216, 217–18 Benson, Frank W., 154 Bernhardt, Sarah, 30 Bert, Paul, 12, 31

Index 269

Bird, Isabella, 245n. 2 Blake, Lillie Devereaux, 52, 152–53 Bly, Nellie, 61 Bonnat, Léon, 233 Boston Transcript, 5 Boston, 5, 154, 241 Brantford, Ontario, 3 Bridgeman, George, 216, 217 British, comments on, 162–63, 175–76, 202, 204, 210, 254 Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane, 9, 101, 102–3, 250 Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. See Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane Broadmoor Hospital, 21, 101 Brymner, William, 13, 58, 83, 122, 149–51 Budget (newspaper), 4, 5 Byron, Lord, 38, 39, 143

C Camberwell House (Surrey), 10, 104, 105, 250 Camerone, Madame Jean, 148–49 Canadian Men and Women of the Time, The (Morgan), 4 “Canadianness” in art, 58, 216–18 in cultural life, 11, 57–58, 67 and feminism, 7, 91 in literature, 21, 57–58, 67, 91–92, 111–12, 117n. 47 and Henry Morgan, 21 and nationalism, 11, 61, 110, 215 and the New Woman, 17–18, 91–92 and Charles Dudley Warner, 65–66, 168 Canadian Pacific Railway, 15, 114n. 18, 122, 157–60, 173 Canadian Travellers in Europe (Kröller), 13, 30, 41 Canadian Who Was Who, The (Roberts and Tunnell), 8 Canadian Women’s Press Club, 64–65 Capulets (characters), 39, 141–42 Carlyle, Thomas, 57

270 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

Ceylon, 16, 74, 79, 203, 252–55 architecture, 202 Colombo, 16, 76–79, 122, 202–8, 252 Colombo Observer (newspaper), 208, 255–56 Galle Face Hotel, 78, 79, 203, 205, 208 incident in, 122, 202–8 letters to family from, 16, 17, 79–80 lotus flower, 77–78, 79, 95–96, 204, 207 Petta (native quarter), 78, 204–5, 206, 207 Champs de Mars, 93, 212 chrysanthemum, 77, 193, 201 “Cipiar”. See Canadian Pacific Railway Colombo Observer (newspaper), 208, 255–56 Colombo, 16, 76–79, 122, 202–8, 252. See also Ceylon Columbia College, 5 Columbia University, 9 Commercial Union, 66, 115n. 24, 115n. 26, 167 Compleat Angler, The (Walton), 69 Constant, Benjamin, 86, 216 Cook’s Tours, 37, 88 Cotes, Everard, 82 Cotes, Mrs. See Duncan, Sara Jeanette Coton Hill Hospital, 250 Coton Hill Lunatic Asylum, 103, 104 Crowthorne, England, 102, 250

D Dante Alighieri, 39, 141 Daudet, Alphonse, 30 Daughter of today, A (Duncan), 18, 90–92 Davin, Nicholas Flood, 64, 165 Da Vinci, Leonardo, 139–40 Dean, Misao, 92 decadence (artistic movement), 92, 116n. 40 Dickens, Charles (novels of), 29 Dongola (Sudan), 5, 88 Dr. Carpenter’s Private School, 35, 113n. 2 Dumas, Alexandre, 38

Index 271

Duncan, Sara Jeanette (Mrs. Cotes) and “Canadianness”, 91–92 columns from Japan, 16 columns in Montreal Daily Star, 3, 10, 14, 16, 60, 75–76 columns in Toronto Star, 14 columns in Washington Post, 14 and decadence movement, 92 letters to Lansing, 15, 21, 251–52 and lotus, 77–79 marriage, 80–82, 90 and the New Woman, 18, 92–93 “Outworn Literary Methods”, 61 personality of, 80, 82 and Riel, 63–64 and religion, 73–74 “Special Correspondence”, 74 and travel writing, 61–63, 69–70, 74–75 world tour with Lewis Rood, 3, 4, 10, 14–16, 59, 249 as writer, 5, 7, 14, 18, 59, 70 See also Grafton, Garth (pseud.); A Daughter of Today; A Social Departure

E Egypt Cairo, 16, 82 Nile River, 5, 10, 88, 250 Suez Canal, 16 Elfrida (character), 90–93

F family, estrangement from, ix, 9, 21, 61, 96–99, 101 feminism and the New Woman, 13–14, 92–93 recent scholarship on, 7, 110 and Lewis Rood, 12, 52–53, 61, 105 fin de siècle, 21, 89, 92–93, 116n. 37 Fleury, Tony Robert, 219–20

272 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

Florence, 38, 41–45, 122, 144–45. See also Italy Florentine Notes (James), 44 Florentine Vignette (Jones), 41–42, 113n. 4 Fowler, Marian, 5–6, 10, 23n. 2, 65, 68 Francis, Daniel, 23n. 9 Fraser River, 67, 170, 177 Frawley, Maria, 44 Fréchette, Louis, 58 French, comments on, 31, 35, 67–68, 176–81

G Galignani’s Messenger, 4, 5, 23n. 1, 88, 90 Galle Face (hotel in Colombo), 78, 79, 203, 205, 207, 208 geishas, 68, 193, 196–97 Georgette (Sardou), 30 Gerson, Carole, 13, 31, 91, 117n. 47 Glacier House (Canadian Rockies), 169, 175 Gortchakow-Stonrdza, Princess, 5 Gortschakoff, Princess, 10, 86, 88, 123, 221–26 Grafton, Garth (pseud. of Sara Jeanette Duncan) “The Bones of Jyeasu”, 70, 72, 73 “A Japanese Snowstorm”, 70 “More About Ceylon”, 74, 78, 79 “Over the Pacific Ocean”, 69 “Regina and Its People”, 63 “Shopping in Japan”, 70 “Winnipeg Whisperings”, 50, 60, 62 See also Duncan, Sara Jeanette guide-books, 38–39, 42

H Hamilton, Major Rowan, 258 Harrison, Frances, 51 Hayes, Kate Simpson, 64 Heaps, Denise A., 75, 114n. 19 Heilbrun, Carolyn, 112 Hong Kong, 16, 77, 253 Hotel Vancouver, 60, 171–72, 174–75

Index 273

Hughes, Florence, 103 Hugo, Victor, 30, 242

I Imaginary Indian (Daniel), 23n. 9 imperial ideal, 57 India Agra, 16, 82 Bombay, 16 Calcutta, 16, 74, 76, 80, 209–11, 255–59 Madras, 16 Taj Mahal, 75, 82 Indians, 62–63, 158 Italians, comments on, 42–43, 52, 140 Italian Sketches (James), 41 Italy, 11, 35–47 architecture, Italian, 12, 46–47, 141, 143–44 Boboli Gardens (Florence) 17, 43, 122, 144–45 Bologna, 38 Florence, 38, 41–45, 122, 144–45 Milan, 38, 122, 139 Naples, 38 Pitti Palace, 144–45 Rome, 38, 44, 46 Sorrento, 38 Uffizi Palace, 45 Venice, 38–41, 45, 51, 70, 122, 141–44 Verona, 43, 122, 140–42

J James, Henry, 12, 16, 41, 43, 44, 70 Jameson, Anna, 12, 45 Japan, 15, 16, 73–74, 181–201 art, 68, 200–201 civilization, 198–201 geishas, 68, 193, 196–97 interview with reporter, 72–73, 122, 182–86 “Japanese Sketches”, 68–76, 85, 122, 181–201

274 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

Kobe, 200 Nagasaki, 68, 200–201 Nikko, 73 religion, 68, 73–74 Taro San, 68, 187–97, 198–99, 245n. 2, 246n. 7 tea-houses, 194–96 Tokyo, 70–71, 186, 194–95, 199 Yokohama, 186, 187, 190, 199, 253 Jerome, Jerome K., 39–40 Jones, Alice, 12, 20, 39–42, 116n. 36

K Kadar, Marlene, 110 King Lear (Shakespeare), 52 Kröller, Eva-Marie, 13, 29–30, 41

L Lang, Marjory, 6, 7 Lansdowne, Lord (Viceroy of Calcutta), 80, 82, 254, 258 Legends of the Madonna (Jameson), 45 Lewis, Albert Edward (brother), 8, 21, 35, 99–101, 253 Lewis, Cynthia (wife of Herbert), 100 Lewis, Eleanor Ida (sister), 8, 99, 103, 105, 108 Lewis, Gwyneth (daugher of Lansing), ix, 117n. 46 Lewis, Herbert (grandson of Lansing), xi, 6, 8–9, 17, 21, 50, 100 Lewis, John (father), ix, 4, 5, 8, 9, 50 Lewis, Lansing Llwellyn Mostyn (brother) birth, 8 children, 117n. 46 correspondence with institutions, 22, 101, 104–5 death, 8, 96, 108 diaries, 21, 35, 37 and estate, 97–100 family rift, 61, 99 letters from Duncan, 15, 21, 60–61, 82 in Montreal, 99 schooling, 35

Index 275

in Winnipeg, 15, 59–60, 99 Lewis, Lily. See Rood, Lily Lewis; Lloyd, Lewis (pseud.); “L.L.” (pseud.) Lewis, Matilda Caroline (mother), 8, 9, 96–99 Lewis, Mostyn (son of Lansing), 100, 117n. 46 Lewis, Sir Herbert (first cousin to John Lewis), 50, 100 Library and Archives Canada, 19 Lighthall, W.D., 58 Liszt, Franz, 30–31, 91, 128–30 literature, Canadian “Confederation Group”, 58, 114n. 12 and Henry Morgan, 21 Lewis Rood’s place in, 7, 19–21, 58, 110 and women, 7, 91–92, 110–12 “L.L.” (pseud. for Lily Lewis Rood) “In Holiday Attire”, 29, 85, 212–15 “Letter from Italy”, 39, 42–43, 45–46, 51–52, 122, 139–46 “Letter from Rome”, 12, 16, 44–47, 52 “Letter from Switzerland”, 38 “Our Paris Letter”, 11–12, 28–31, 52, 121, 128–31, 134–38 “A Paris Pension”, 28, 130–34 “From Paris to Switzerland”, 38 “Paul Bert”, 12, 31 See also Rood, Lily Lewis; Lloyd, Louis (pseud.) Lloyd George, David, x, 50, 100, 103 Lloyd, Dame Mary (maternal grandmother), 51 Lloyd, Louis, (pseud. of Lily Lewis Rood), 43, 50–88 “Anacreontic” (poem), 58, 156 “Around the World by Ourselves”, 157 “The Artist Fin de Siècle”, 86, 89 “Concerning Religion in Japan”, 74 “From the French of François Coppée”, 50, 148 “In Holiday Attire”, 85, 212–15 “An Incident by the Sea”, 78, 95–96, 122, 202–8 “Japanese Sketches”, 122, 181–201 “By Lantern Light”, 69, 70, 71, 193–98 “Letter from Japan”, 198 “Looking Back”, 69, 77

276 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

“Louis Lloyd’s Letters”, 52, 62–67, 72–73, 79, 91, 96 “Montreal Letter”, 4, 12–13, 50–53, 58, 83, 148–52 “Native Talent Abroad”, 215–20 “From New York”, 152–55 “On the Cipiar”, 157–60 “Parisian Personages”, 221–26 “Parisian Personalities”, 10, 17, 123, 221–26 “Parisian Topics”, 83, 212–26 Regina and Its People, 63 “Sayonara”, 69, 72, 76, 198–201 “Some Canadian Artists in Paris”, 215–20 “A Sunday in Calcutta”, 74, 77, 123, 209–11 “Taro San”, 187–93 See also Rood, Lily Lewis; “L.L.” (pseud.) London World, 4, 5 London, 5, 10, 16, 249 Loti, Pierre, 72, 73, 122, 200–201 lotus flower, 77–78, 79, 95–96, 204, 207

M MacIntosh, John, 97 Madame Chrysanthème (Loti), 72, 73, 122, 200–201 Madonnas, representations of, 45, 144–45 Marion de Lorme (Hugo), 30 Massenet, Jules, 30, 67, 178 McKim, Helen, 117n. 46 McMullen, Lorraine, 20 Mead, Jennie (cousin), 99 Medicine Hat, 65, 166 Meissonier, Jean-Louis-Ernest, 239–40 Meudon, 31, 131, 139, 167 Miserere (Massenet), 30 Mitford, Mary, 46, 112, 113n. 9 Modern Art (journal), 10, 17, 94 Montreal artists in, 13, 57–58 authors in, 58 birthplace, 4, 249

Index 277

and Duncan, 14 events described in, 50–52 family in, 8–9, 99, 54–55 ill. 5, 250 family plot in, 8, 109 ill. 11, 250 Montreal Daily Star articles from Paris, 4, 10, 14, 29 Sara Jeanette Duncan in, 16, 60, 75–76 Garth Grafton in, 3, 14, 16, 75–76, 78, 116n. 32 Louis Lloyd in, 3, 83 and Henry Norman, 69, 78 sketch of 8 June 1889, 123, 212–15 sketch of 15 July 1889, 123, 215–20 Montreal Girls’ School, 8 Montreal High School, 8 Moosomin, 15, 63, 160–61 Morgan, Henry biographer, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12 on Lewis Rood’s publications, 69, 86 and the Princess Gortschakoff, 88 Types of Canadian Women, 21 Morris, Edmund, 58 Mount Royal Cemetery, x, 8, 108, 109, 250

N New Salon, 4, 5, 93, 231–33 New Woman Ardis on, 93 definition of, 13–14 in fiction, 17–18, 89, 92 and Lewis Rood, 105 and sketch form, 21–22 New Women, New Novels (Ardis), 93 New York Bookman, 5, 10, 19, 95, 228 New York World, 14, 59 New York, 9, 98, 152–55 Nile (river), 5, 10, 88, 250 Norman, Henry, 69, 78, 183

278 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

Norris, Mrs. (wife of Chief Justice Norris of Calcutta), 256–57, 259 North West Rebellion, 63 Northwest Mounted Police, 164

O O Mitsu San, 196–99, 194, 246n. 7 O’Brien, Lucien, 58 Orthodocia Love (character), 3, 14, 18, 74–75, 80 Otello (Verdi), 155 Ottawa Post, 82 Ottawa, 14

P Paddling Her Own Canoe (Gerson & Strong-Boag), 13 Pall Mall Gazette, 4, 5 “Artists at Home”, 86 “Celebrities and Their Portraits”, 86 Duncan’s review in, 72 Louis Lloyd in, 10, 17, 86, 89, 221 Henry Norman in, 69 “Private Views in the Artists’ Studios”, 86 Paris 3, 4, 9, 31, 37, 89. See also under individual places; elements Paris Exposition, 10, 17, 83, 85, 212, 213–14 Paris Salon, 93, 216, 232–33 Pater, Walter, 12, 45, 91, 92, 113n. 6 Peel, Paul, 83, 215–17 Pellow, George, 153 Penang, 16 pensions, 15, 28, 29, 121, 130–34, 213–14 Philippoteaux, 53 prairies, 61–62, 79, 168, 172 Prang & Company (Boston), 4, 10, 17, 231 Pulitzer, Joseph, 14, 59, 82 Purer Taste, A (Gerson), 31 Puvis de Chavannes, Pierre as artist, 231–44

Index 279

exhibition, 31 and L.L. Rood’s writing style, 18–19, 93–94 Modern Art, article in, 17, 18–19, 94 monograph on, 4, 5, 6, 10, 17, 31, 89 form of name, 23n. 7 and New Salon, 93–94, 231–32

R Radcliffe, Ann, 41 Rafaella (artist), 219–20 Raffaelli, Jean-François, 239 Raphael, 45, 144 Re(dis)covering Our Foremothers (McMullen), 20 Redney: A Life of Sara Jeanette Duncan (Fowler), 5, 10, 65, 68 Regina Leader, 15, 59, 64, 165 Regina, 15, 37, 63–64, 162–65 religion, comments on, 45-46, 52–53, 61, 73–74, 135 Renaissance, The (Pater), 92 Riel, Louis, 63–64, 160 Robert Elsmere (Mrs. Humphrey Ward), 66, 93, 168 Robstone, Dr., 101, 102 Rockies, Canadian, 38, 168–69 Rood, Lily Lewis in asylums, 101–8, 250 baby, possibility of, 6, 9, 104 birth, 8–9, 23n. 5, 249 childhood, 35–37 chronology, 249–50 death, 8, 10, 105–8, 250 divorce, 6, 9, 98, 250 as “Elfrida Bell”, 90–92 and estate, 96–98, 102 family, alienation from, ix, 9, 21, 61, 96–99, 101, 250 letters to family, 9, 16–17, 79–80, 99, 252–59 marriage, 5, 9, 17, 86, 249 mental illness of, ix, 9, 21–22, 101–4 in Montreal, 4, 8–9, 21, 249–50

280 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

as “Orthodocia Love”, 3, 14, 18, 74–75, 80 personality of, 5, 11–12, 19, 58, 66 in Regina, 15, 63–64, 122 in Vanvouver, 15, 122 in Winnipeg, 15, 22, 63–64 world tour with Duncan, 3, 4, 10, 14–16, 59, 249 as writer, 7, 11, 15, 19–20, 37, 110–12 works “The Face in the Mirror” (poem), 95, 228 “Little Book of Japanese Sketches”, 69, 101 “Notes on News from Paris”, 12 “Paul Bert”, 12, 31 “Pierre Puvis de Chavannes”, 17, 18–19, 94 Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (monograph), 5, 6, 10, 31, 93–94, 231–44, 250 “A Perfume” (poem), 95, 229–30 See also Lloyd, Louis (pseud.); “L.L.” (pseud.) Rood, Ogden N. (father-in-law), 4, 5, 9 Rood, Roland (husband) as artist, 89, 99 divorce from Lewis Rood, 9, 98, 250 marriage to Lewis Rood, 4, 5, 9, 86, 249 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 45, 92 Routhier, Adolfe-Basil, 30 Royal Society, The, 57 Royden, Agnes Maude, 105 Ruskin, John “literature of art”, 45 and Puvis de Chavannes, 94 influence on Lewis Rood, 12, 16, 41, 43, 70 Stein on, 113n. 5 Unrau on, 115n. 28

S Sacred and Legendary Art (Jameson), 45 Salvation Army (Canada), 53 Sand, George, 38 Sapho (Daudet), 30

Index 281

Sara Jeanette Duncan: Novelist of Empire (Tausky), 5, 73 Sardou, Victorien, 30 Scott, Agnes, 51 Seattle, 176 Seine (river), 28, 29, 85, 131 Selkirk (mountains), 15 shooting party, 177–81 Singapore, 16, 205 sketch, as genre, 7, 16, 22, 69, 111–12 Smith, Charles Alexander, 216, 217 Smith, Edward G., 104, 168 Smith, Goldwyn, 66 Snowdon, Hoyes Lloyd (uncle), 51 Snowdon, Matilda Caroline (later Mrs. John Lewis), 96–97 Social Departure, A (Duncan), 3, 90, 93, 245n. 1 and the New Woman, 13–14 and “Orthodocia Love”, 14, 18, 74–75, 80 review of, 72–73 as travel writing, 70–71, 74, 79, 90 Stafford, Staffordshire, 9, 104, 250 Stage-Land (Jerome), 39–40, 113n. 4 Stein, Richard, 44–45, 113n. 5 St. George’s Church (London), 9 St. James Gazette, 4, 5 Strong-Boag, Veronica, 13 Studies in the South and West with Comments on Canada (Warner), 65–66 Sue, Eugène, 38 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 92 Swinglehurst, Edmund, 37, 88 Switzerland, 11, 35–39, 169

T Tarbell, Edmund C., 154 Taro San, 68, 187–97, 198–99, 245n.2, 246n.7 Tausky, Thomas, 5–6, 72 tea-houses (Japan), 194–96 Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 40

282 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

Temps, Le (Paris newspaper), 5 Times (London), 4, 5 Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), 45 Toronto Star, 14 tourism, 40, 61, 77 Townsend, F.H., 75 travel literature, 38, 61–62, 76, 110–11, 245n. 2 and Duncan, 18, 74, 75, 79 and “L.L.”, 12, 38–44 and Louis Lloyd, 61–63, 74–75, 79 Twelfth Night (Shakespeare), 52 Types of Canadian Women (Morgan), 21

V Van Beer, M., 86 Vancouver, 15–16, 100, 168, 170–81, 251–52 Vecchio, Palma, 45 Venice, 38–41, 45, 51, 70, 122, 141–44 Verdi, Giuseppe, 155 Verne, Jules, 61 Veronese, Paul, 226 Victoria, 170–71

W Wagner, Richard, 39, 143, 155 Wales, 50 Wallace, Sir Donald M., 258 Walton, Izaac, 69, 115n. 27 Ward, Mrs. Humphrey, 93, 168 Warner, Charles Dudley, 65–66, 82, 122, 166–71, 170–71 Washington Post, 14 Week, The (Toronto) articles from Paris, 10–11, 83 and Carole Gerson, 31 and Alice Jones, 12, 39 “L.L.” in, 11, 12, 17, 28, 128–46 Louis Lloyd in, 3, 4, 5, 14, 75, 148–211 column of 3 January 1886, 28

Index 283

column of 11 February 1886, 11 column of 22 April 1886, 128–30 column of 6 May 1886, 130–34 column of 22 July 1886, 134–35 column of 23 December 1886, 135–38 column of 30 December 1886, 12 column of 13 January 1887, 139–44 column of 7 April 1887, 144–46 column of 9 June 1887, 12 column of 9 February 1888, 148–52 column of 3 May 1888, 152–55 column of 11 October 1888, 157–60 column of 18 October 1888, 160–62 column of 25 October 1888, 162–65 column of 14 December 1888, 166–71 column of 28 December 1888, 171–81 column of 18 January 1889, 181–86 column of 7 June 1889, 187–93 column of 21 June 1889, 193–98 column of 9 August 1889, 198–201 column of 27 December 1889, 202–8 column of 14 February 1890, 209–11 poem of 10 November 1887, 50 poem of 4 October 1888, 156 Who’s Who in Canada, 8 Wider Range, A (Frawley), 44 Winnipeg, 15, 59–60, 63, 74, 99, 157–60, 251 Winnipeg Free Press, 64 Women and the Commonwealth (Pellow), 154 women’s life writing, 22, 110 Women’s Pictorial, The (periodical), 75 women’s rights, 52–53, 152–53 Women Who Made the News (Lang), 7 World’s Congress on Ornithology, The (ed. Lily Lewis Rood), 4 Writing a Woman’s Life (Heilbrun), 112

Z Zola, Émile, 31, 92, 94, 239

284 Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist

“This study…promises to reposition Lewis in her milieu, and to draw attention to a compelling body of work.” Cecily Devereux, Department of English, University of Alberta

Canadian writer and journalist Lily Lewis is not a household name. In fact, she never was. The work Lewis is best known for – “Montreal Letter,” a popular column which appeared in the Toronto newspaper The Week in the late 1880s – was written under the pseudonym Louis Lloyd. In 1888, Lewis and fellow writer Sara Jeannette Duncan embarked on a journey around the world, sending articles about their travels back to their respective newspapers, The Week and the Montreal Daily Star. Lewis became immortalized as a character in Duncan’s fictionalized account of their journey, but as a writer she has been almost entirely forgotten to history. Though Lewis continued to publish a variety of work up until 1912, her writing prior to and following her world tour has received no critical attention, and almost nothing has been known about her personal life. Peggy Martin’s painstaking research has brought new details to light. She examines Lewis’s work in the context of Canadian travel writing and journalism at the turn of the century, and discusses her use of the sketch as her preferred literary form. Part critical study, part biography, part edited collection, this volume provides new insight into feminist expression in the nineteenth century, and reclaims Lily Lewis’s place in Canadian literary history.

Margaret (Peggy) Martin teaches in the Department of English at the University of Saskatchewan. www.uofcpress.com

ISBN 1-55238-190-0 978-1-55238-190-8