Metropolis of the North: The History of Montreal by the Dean of Canadian Letters

TO AMERICANS Montreal means one of three things: a name on a map; a city to rush through on the way to Europe or to the fishing rivers and lakes of Canada; or a great sprawling metropolis with a strong French accent, gray stone buildings, and precipitous streets — a place of deceptive and rewarding charm. Mr. Leacock has written a book essentially for an American audience, and his chapters are wonderfully conceived to interest all of us, no matter to which of the three categories we belong. He is offering an historical and interpretive volume satisfying in detail to the layman and enchanting in the obliquity of its prose. Basically, of course, it is a Leacock tour through four centuries of North American history.

Readers who know the Dean of Canadian Letters will understand that, however serious his intention, such a tour is not to be undertaken without certain asides, flippancies, contemporary analogies, and wit for its own sake. But even a lover of Francis Parkman will feel that he is walking hallowed ground, for Mr. Leacock in his preface, which is not to be missed, refers to Parkman’s writing as “ a marvelous blending of genius and accuracy, of picturesque charm and reliable fact, never . . . excelled.” Furthermore, if some armchair historian should criticize this book for its inequality of treatment of certain obscure Canadian events, I should side with Mr. Leacock for not having written what his audience in general would undoubtedly not read.

In the first place, the author is in love with his subject. History swept up the great St. Lawrence like a tide, and the fortunes of three nations -or four, if you count Spain’s remote hand — were involved in it.

But all the strings here are kept separate: the weaving is loose and free, and the final pattern indelibly clear. Mr. Leacock has a way of making the river part-hero, and the reader feels the strength of its force on almost every page. The weather and scenery also play an appropriate role. The great and lesser figures of the past emerge and remain clear in the mind: Cartier, Champlain, Maisonneuve, Frontenac, Father Charlevoix, Montgomery, Vaudreuil, Montcalm — on down to Dawson and McGill. Anyone unable to distinguish a Micmac from a Mohawk will discover that Mr. Leacock has defined and characterized the Indians so that the great family of the Algonquins may be distinguished tribe by tribe. Sympathies are definite, and many brief portraits declare the artist who painted them. Arnold, however, is lightly dismissed; Captain Rogers, only once referred to, is a “dubious presence.” And throughout runs the good talk of furs and fortifications, peace and terror, flood and disaster, heroism and strength, and the “vast and beautiful country” of Vaudreuil’s own phrase.

Epigrams and phrases are worth a pencil in the reader’s hand. “When the river freezes,” said Frontenac, “I am King.” “The stone tomahawk of the Indians,” says Leacock, “was an instrument of argument, not of carpentering.” Or again, speaking of origins: “It is st range to think that it was in the lounge room of the University Club that Jacques Cartier read the Gospel of St. John to the savages. It is a thing that would stand doing again. ” Or “The climate of Montreal is for many of us the best in all the world. Beside it London is dark and California garish, Winnipeg cold, New Orleans hot, Philadelphia neutral, and New York impossible.”

There are great chapters on Montreal as the capital of Canada, on Montreal as a port, on industry and commerce, on the strange mingling of French and English in the streets of the city—this last in the vein of the Leacock essay. There is a fine concise history of McGill University, of whose faculty Mr. Leacock was a distinguished member for thirtysix years. As to Montreal the port (and here the economist speaks out with graphic facts and figures), the author early establishes himself in favor of the St. Lawrence seaway. With undoubted intention, the book is a persuasive argument for the project.

Let no one think that this is a Canadian book for Canadians only. It is not. The city which overthrew the early port of Quebec is destined to be one of the three or four greatest cities on the North American continent. But this is not a boastful book, though Montreal will never have a more loving historian.

DAVID MCCORD