Lögberg - 20.08.1953, Blaðsíða 2

2 LÖGBERG, FIMMTUDAGINN 20. ÁGÚST, 1953
Stephan G. Stephansson
and North America
(An address by Dr. Watson KirkconnelL presidenl ol Acadia
Universiiy. given at Gimli, Manitoba, August 3rd, 1953
Mr. Chairman, Guests of Honour, Maid of the Mountain,
Venerable Pioneers, Ladies and Gentlemen:
I feel it a high honour to be invited here to pay my tribute to
a great man—at once a great Icelander and a great Canadian.
It is over thirty years since I first settled in Winnipeg and
joined the staff of Wesley College. It was my first contact with
the Icelandic tradition. Skuli Johnson and Olaf Anderson were my
colleagues. Jón and Hrefna Bildfell, Einar Einarsson, Vilhjálmur
Kristjánsson, Grettir Leo Johannsson, Beatrice Gíslason and many
other young Iaelanders were among my pupils. Icelandic, at the
college level, was taught in our class-rooms. It is small wonder
that as the years passed by I came to have respect and affection
íor Icelandic literature, both east and west of the ocean, and for
the indomitable people whose spirit is expressed in its intricate
measures. And in this literature I encountered the remarkable
personality of Stephan G. Stephansson. I never met him in the
flesh. Though he lived for five years after I reached Winnipeg,
my contact with the Icelandic community was still very tenuous
end our orbits never intersected. I must speak of him therefore
only as I have known him through his published prose and verse.
We have met this ctay to pay tribute to a great man, one of the
greatest men that Canada has produced.
And yet here I must check myself, for in the truest sense it
was not Canada, but Iceland, that produced Stephan G. Stephans-
son. It was not at Markerville, Alberta, but on a small farm named
Kirkjuhóll, in the parish of Skagafjörður, on the north coast of
Iceland, that he was born one hundred years ago. It was not in.
Canada but in Iceland that he spent the first twenty years of his
life—the formative years of nurture and education during which
the granite of his character was chiselled into the shape that was
to remain unchanged for the rest of his days. Neither should we
forget that for the next six-
teen years, from the age of
twenty to the age of thirty-six,
he lived, not in Canada but in
the United States; it was in
Wisconsin that he married an
Icelandic bride, Helga Jóns-
dóttir, and begat his first
children; and it was with a
group of Dakotan settlers that
he finally moved to *a new
pioneering enterprise in Al-
berta, about eighty miles
north of Calgary. Although
almost exactly half of Stephan
G.’s life was spent in Canada,
we cannot assume that one-
half of its significance was ab-
sorbed from its Canadian set-
ting. As will have been made
abundantly clear by oljiers
here this day, his mind and
character were quarried in
youth out of the racial stock
and the intellectual tradition
of his native Iceland, and all
through life he continued to
saturate his soul with the lit-
erature, mythology and history of the Norse world. His children
and grandchildren might grow up with North American conscious-
ness, Canadians formed withou^ a struggle in the mental and spir-
itual climate of this country. But Stephan G. remained that ever-
tragic type, so common in our history, a grown man transplanted
to a strange land in the prime of his powers and incapable, by the
very strength of his nature, of merging freely into the traditions
of his adopted country. Hence, when he sought to express himself
with the pen, he had recourse, by choice and compulsion, to the
language of his heart; he wrote in Icelandic, not English.
I have been asked to speak today of the relations of Stephan
G. Stephansson to the New World. But to understand those rela-
tions, we need tó view him in a wider setting of human adjustment.
His is the story of a highly gifted immigrant coming “west of the
ocean” and coming in contact with the dynamic, if somewhat
chaotic, pioneer life of the American and Canadian West, But we
need to dig deeper. What sort of man was this? By what forces
had his nature been shaped in his native Iceland? And what was
the character of the North American community with which he
came in contact?
At the outset we may note that he was brought up in a land
of “plain living and high thinking”. Poverty cramped his youth;
his parents were unable to give him more than the training of the
elementary school; and the lean farm on whích he was born has
long since been abandoned and turned back to the wilderness. Yet
bis was a race among whom the, humblest farmer or fisherman
might be expected "to compose good verses, a land that had been
settled by the freedom-loving poets of the age of Harald Fair-hair,
a land that in saga days had sent a continual swarm of poets forth
to do the “grand tour” of the courts of the Scandinavian world.
Poetry was certainly within the grasp of the humble farmer’s son.
His parents, though poor, had keen intelligence and cultural
interests. He had, moreover, other hereditary grounds for self-
confidence. Was he not related, on his father’s side, to the provost
of the diocese of Holar? And was he not a kinsman of the famous
poet, Benedikt Gröndal? As every French soldier, in Napolean’s
day, was áaid to carry a marshal’s baton in his knapsack, might
not the young Stephan G. feel that he, too, had in him the capacity
íor high poetic utterance, in keeping with his gifted kinfolk?
In estimating the set and temperament of his youth, one must
remember also that the period from his birth until his emigration
in 1873 was marked by bitter conflict between Icelandic national
feeling and the efforts of the Danish monarchy and parliament to
keep the island in a state of ignominious subjection. From 1870
onward, tens of thousands of Icelanders fled from their ancient
homeland to the New World, partly through economic impoverish-
inent and partly to avoid the tyranny of far-off Denmark. When
the occasion for a millenial celebration in 1874 came over the
horizon, one farmer proposed that this festival should take the
form of a day of national mourning and of public farewell to an
emigrating people. The early months of 1873 were marked by
public demonstrations in Reykjavík against the representative of
the Danish crown. It was amid scenes of this sort that Stephan G.
Stephansson set sail for America, resolved not merely to achieve
economic independence but to enjoy a life of political freedom.
The three previous years had indeed been spent as a farm hand
in one of the poorest districts of northeast Iceland, but the pressure
of alien rule in his youth had helped to intensify a rebellious spirit
of freedom.
In the New World, however, he had still to endure hardness.
Arriving with empty hands, he first hired out as a day labourer
near Milwaukee. After -hoarding his wages for a year, he felt
ready to strike out as a pioneer settler in Shawano County, Wis-
eonsin; and here he married and began to establish a family. Six
years later, in 1880, he started all over again in Pembina County,
North Dakota, and toiléd from dawn to dark for nine long years.
Still dogged by poverty and in search of wider horizons, he then
began pioneer life for the third time, locating in a new settlement,
eighty miles north of Calgary and seventy miles from the nearest
post office. But the soil was good and unremitting toil fpr the next
three decades brought his family a measure of prosperity.
In view of this long record of labour and hardship, it is not
surprising that he viewed the economic system of his time with a
critical eye. In an era of almost uncontrolled economic exploitation
(1874-1890) he saw fabulous fortunes made by slick urban
speculators and manipulators, while the very survival of the
pioneer farmer was jeopardized by dishonest fluctuations in the
national and international markets. By background and calling
he might be a frontier farmer, but he was a frontier farmer with
a first-class brain—and that brain condemned graft and corruption
wherpver he saw them. He had an almost automatic sympathy
for the under-dog, no matter who he might be, in the economic,
the social or the political world.
Hence it was that from the earliest of his published work, he
gained the reputation of being a radical. In 1888, while still in
the Pembina County settlement, he joined with others in founding
an Icelandic Cultural Society (Menningarfélag), modelled after a
similar group established by Felix Adler in New York. Its
dominant slogans were “Humanity, Research and Liberty”; and
in such a cause we find young Stephan lecturing enthusiastically
on Robert G. Ingersoll. In May 1890, he writes to Sveinn Björnssori
at great length, analyzing the contest and editorial quality of some
fifteen radical periodicals in the United States, ranging from The
Freethinker's Magazine of Buffalo, N.Y., to The Individualisi of
Denver, Colorado. These represent in fact the range of his social
sympathy. On the one hand he never ceased to condemn capitalistic
exploitation and to espouse the cause of the labouring class, with
frank expressoins of socialist intent; on the other hand, as a life-
long pioneer farmer, building up an independent competence for
bimself and his family, he was an incorrigible individualist. As
he clearly states in his letters, he never took his stand with any
political group or adopted any party program. The biting quality
of his comment was clear enough, however. In a letter to Jonas
Hall, written in 1889, soon after his arrival in Alberta, he remarks:
“There are no politics here. Sir John and the C.P.R. rule here
like God Almighty, without anyone perceiving it.” Years later,
in January, 1918, he was to pay tribute to Sir Wilfred Laurier: “He
was and is the fairest and most idealistic statesman ‘of the old
school’ in Canada, resembling Gladstone in many ways.”
His attitude towards war was one of frank abhorrence, and
got him into trouble more than once. At the time of the Boer War,
for example, he aligned himself with the little Dutch community
of South Africa and in his powerful poem “The Transvaal” attacked
the British Empire for what he considered to be its oppression of
the small and the weak. During the First World War he was even
more outspoken in his denunciation. A cycle of poems called
The Trail of War appeared in 1920, blasting the leaders on both
sides of the conflict and describing the horrors of modern warfare
with relentless realism. One of his quatrains gives blistering com-
ment on the commercial aspects of that struggle:
“ln Europe’s reeking slaughter-pen
They mince the jlesh of murdered men,
While swinish merchants, snout in trough,
Drink all the bloody profits off.”
He was not like the clamorous pacifists of today who serve,
wittingly or unwittingly, as a cloak for the greatest military con-
spiracy of all time. Stephan was simply an individualist with a
conscience, assailing a thing that he hated. It lost him many
friends at the time—in view of the heroic and costly record of the
Icelandic-Canadians in World War I but his transparent honesty
soon won most of them back.
Another thing that for a time, at any rate, cost him much
popularity, was his hostility to the narrow-mindedness, conserva-
tism and hypocrisy of many of the established churches and their
clergy. Yet he was not an atheist. A large Bible stood on the
desk of his farm-house study and was in constant use. His poem
“Eloi lamma sabakhthani” is a moving expression of his loyalty
to the atoning message of a crucified Saviour. Some would class
him as a Unitarian; but he is best understood as a Protestant of
the Protestants, maintaining to the end his right to confront
divine Reality in his own individual fashion—but that fashion
starkly rationalistic.
Thus far I have dealt chiefly with ways in which the impact
of this iron man on the flinty rocks of a new environment beat
out sparks of protest and repudiation. Yet this is only one part
of the story. In other, and equally significant ways, he accepted
the new land as the country of his true allegiance. Canada, after
1889, became his home and the home of his little children. He was
cne of the first organizers of the Markerville school district. In
fact, the first schoolhouse was built on the Stephansson farm and
received the patronage of his six children. Out of his slender
means he contributed to every good cause in the community. His
letters reveal the wide range of friendships in Canada and the
United States — and likewise reveal how this self-taught genius
stood head and shoulders above most of his contemporaries. He
took a distinguished part in the annual festivals—such as this one
today—in which the Icelandic community paid its tribute to the
Old Land and to the New. His great poem “Úr Islendingadags
ræðu” opens Sigurður Nordal’s Úrval of 1939 and is the noblest
tribute rendered by any Canadian to his ancestral home; but he
also left eloquent testimony to the place that Canada has claimed
in his heart. Such are his “Fósturlandið”, his “Sveitin mín” and
“Klettafjöll”, with their almost untranslatable incantation, his
“Greniskógurinn”, his “Sumarkvöld í Alberta” and his “Bundin
ræða fyrir minni Kanada”, first read at the Icelander’s pay here in
1902. One may go further and claim that no other Canadian poet
in any language has painted the Canadian landscape in the same
sensitive detail and with the same sweep of eloquence. The
prairies and the mountains of the Canadian West live imperishably
in his verse.
The writers of the English-speaking world likewise passed
into his consciousness but fragmentarily and unsystematically. He
remarks in a letter dated 1902 that he had “once read Shakespeare,
twenty years ago”, but apart from one poem there is no other sign
of interest or influence. The only other British writers whom he
mentions with approval belong to his own period: John Morley,
Herbert Spencer, T. H. Huxley, J. M. Barrie, “Ian Maclaren”,
Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson, George
Eliot, Rider Haggard, and Hall Caine. In other words, his taste
ran to rationalists and to story-tellers. So far as North America
is concerned, he speaks of Emerson, Longfellow, Poe and Holmes
in the older generation and much more frequently of his con-
temporaries, Upton Sinclair, Jack London and Mark Twain. The
only Anglo-Canadian author mentioned by name is “Ralph
Connor”. Yet we are perhaps wrong in looking in his cor-
respondence for a detailed catalogue of his library; for even
Icelandic literature, which influenced him deeply, is not set forth
in any such fashion. Certainly he was not isolated in interest from
the continent of his adoption and the people with whom he shared
it came very close to his heart.
Returning to my earlier thesis, I would assert in conclusion
that Stephan G. Stephansson sums up triumphantly the problem
faced by the new settler in a strange land. On the one hand he
had his responsibility to his foster-country, the task of hewing out
a new home in the wilderness, of making provision through his
toil and his thrift for the on-going of the race in his own children,
of seeing to it by his mastery of the soil that mankind itself might
be fed. All these and many other responsibilities he met without
faltering and without complaining.
But he was also a man of transcendent gifts or spirit. In him
there was an uncontrollable urgency of creation, and he “was not
disobedient to the heavenly vision”. There was every external
reason why he should have remained a “mute inglorious Milton”
to the end of his days. He had little education except such as he
gave himself. He was constrained to endure back-breaking toil all
of his days. He had no time for writing except the hours that
others gave to sleep. Yet his published articles and letters total
1400 pages and his published poetry 1800 pages, much of it of the
very first rank. By being true to his own endowments of nature
as well as to his duties to family and fosterland, he has enriched
them both with spiritual wealth as well, and left for himself a
deathless name among the citizens of this, our country. It is to the
indomitable poet even more than to the indomitable pioneer that
the Government dedicated a provincial park in his name three
years ago in Markerville, Alberta. It is to the unconquerable spirit
of a gifted man that they erected a monument there for alljliosin
of a gifted man ^that they erected a monument there for all
posterity to see.
Yet even these will pass, unless some Canadians keep alive,
generation after generation, the noble language in which his hopes
and aspirations are embodied. That is part of the duty laid upon
us by his legacy of Icelandic prose and verse. The other part is
fidelity to the ideals for which he stood — a passion for work,
abhorrence for tyranny and hypocrisy, reverence for human
reason, and profound sympathy for all mankind.
‘Stephan G. was primarily a poet, and for my last words I
must turn to verses that I have penned for this occasion:
TO STEPHAN G.
Beneath the prairie grass your dust is sleeping,
Close to the fields your daily toil once blest,
While, towering high, the mighty hills are keeping
Their timeless watch above your timeless rest.
Such were the mountains of your boyhood homeland,
Vast peaks of rock and ice, yet fierce with fire
As these are not, for in this fertile loam-land
The only lava was your heart’s desire.
I
Rugged you seemed to strangers, like the summit
Of misty headlands near the frozen Pole,
But deeper than the questing eye could plummet
Burned the volcanic ardour of your soul.
Man’s viólence you loathed, of every fashion;
The tyrant and the cheat called forth your hate;
At human war you raged with searing passion,
And greatly burned against the wicked great.
Yet these same fires that flamed within your spirit
Could be benign, with warmth of honest love;
Could raise a faithful friend to heaven, or near it,
And light our world with radiance from above.
Through the long nights, while calmer hearts lay slumbering,
The fire within your brain burned white and warm,
Melting the fervent thoughts in moulds past numbering,
Fusing the ore of words to deathless form.
«
A hundred years have passed since first you lifted
On Iceland’s air a baby’s quavering cry,
And other hundreds will in sooth have drifted
Across our earth before your voice can die.
Nay, while the saga-tongue is known and cherished
And to warm ears its majesty imparts,
The essence of your soul will not have perished
But still live glorious in remembering hearts.
Slephan G. Síephansson