Delphi complete works of.., p.771
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 771
Like the lower schools, the high schools are entirely separated on lines of religion and language; so, too, the classical colleges and the universities at the top. The special Irish schools (the Callaghan, O’Connell, and Catholic High) divide off in their own fashion. Slight exceptions are seen in the technical schools of the province which teach both races together, yet at Montreal even the technical school has an English and a French division.
The most peculiar case of all, the reductio ad absurdum, is that of the almost complete mutual isolation of the University of Montreal and McGill University. Their present buildings are situated about a mile apart and down the street, with an excellent sidewalk and streetcars all the way. In each college are a continuous series of things “open to the public.” There are about six hundred instructors on the staff of McGill. Most of them, it may be said with assurance, are never inside the University of Montreal for years at a time. Many live and die without entering it. The writer of this book can recall personally the case of a McGill professor, on the staff for thirty-six years, a man of some distinction, who entered the University of Montreal (Laval in those days) only once — in his first week at McGill. The students keep entirely apart, except now and again, once in a great while, they meet in hostile clashes as in the time of the South African War. It used to be the custom for Laval students to march over to the McGill grounds in procession once a winter, a custom now fallen out. There is no interlocking of studies or lectures. A student of medicine at McGill does not attend or see or hear anything connected with the lectures or clinics of the University of Montreal. He may, once or twice in his course, hear a distinguished local French doctor lecture on a special topic to the McGill medical public but only as he might, and does, hear doctors from New York or Toronto.
The two universities know each other, of course, officially. They interchange seats of the mighty at convocations. They help install one another’s new principals. McGill from time to time confers a degree on a distinguished representative of the University of Montreal, on which occasion the principal of McGill speaks, or, rather, reads, a flattering tribute in excellent French — too good to be true, all except the pronunciation. The Montreal newspapers comment, as they have for a hundred years, on the principal of McGill’s perfect command of French. But in reality his command is what the restaurants call a “short order.”
The question of clashes between the races in Montreal has been mentioned above. This, of course, is the abiding danger in the life of the city. The soil under the feet of its people covers ashes never extinct. Its real volcano still smolders. Every now and then such clashes have occurred, on a minor scale, and occur as election riots. At times in the past they have occurred in a form to create the greatest alarm.
A case in point is the Gavazzi Riot of 1853 to which a reference was made in a previous chapter. Here the danger was heightened by the further intrusion of Irish animosity. The Irish being mainly Roman Catholics, but speaking English, would naturally seem a sort of connecting link, an element of union between the two races. Unfortunately this is not so. Indeed, the case is the other way or at least was the other way during most of the history of the city. The Irish being against England for Ireland’s sake, many of them, refugees and outcasts from a land depopulated under British rule, were more anti-British than the French themselves. Whenever all these elements coincide and combine the results have always been terrible to contemplate.
Father Alessandro Gavazzi, was an Italian ex-Roman Catholic priest who had given up being that kind of father. He was, or said he was, an Italian patriot, a thing that sounded better then than it does now. For these were the days of the sorrows of Italy under Austrian rule, of England’s sympathy, and presently of the hero worship of Garibaldi’s red shirt — the shirt now turned to black.
Gavazzi came to the United States, lecturing, on Italian Liberty and Romish Tyranny. He could do a turn on either. He came to Quebec, lectured on the Inquisition, and narrowly escaped from the row that followed. Then he came to Montreal to speak in the Zion Church that stood on what was still called the Haymarket (Victoria Square). The audience, scenting danger, or a good time, came well armed. The garrison contributed a detachment of Cameron Highlanders concealed near the church. The Mayor was there, all ready to read the Riot Act. There was angry controversy afterward as to whether the scene was all set for the riot or the riot set the scene. At any rate, a body of Irishmen tried to break into the church where Gavazzi was lecturing. Firing broke out. The audience left the church. A confused crowd was apparently, as we now say, “milling round” on Beaver Hall Hill, some fighting, some trying to get away. The Mayor, Charles Wilson, read the Riot Act . . . without avail . . . the fight went on; the soldiers fired. Forty people were shot down, others trampled down as the mob broke and ran. Gavazzi got out with his life and was smuggled across the river. The town seemed appalled. There was no inquiry, no arrests — just horror. They had raised the devil.
An interesting light is thrown on the French-and-English aspect of Montreal and of its history by a study of the names of the city streets.
The street names of any great American city offer an interesting study reflecting its historic growth. They are like the concentric rings that indicate, on the sawed-off stump of a tree, the years and the rate of its expansion. Now it shrinks to the narrow lines that mark unfavorable seasons, now enlarges to the broad bands that recall the generous growth of prosperous years. More than that. Street names also tell us much of the culture and the dominant thought of the times, as when the loneliness of exile prompts early settlers to name their forest stream the Thames, their log cabins London, and the bush about them Middlesex. An opposite tendency leads settlers to accept and take pride in the aboriginal names which they find in use among the savages, a pride which gives New Brunswick its proud Mettawomkeag, its Passamoquoddy, and its Skidawabskasis. An equally natural impulse is to name things in a new land in honor of sovereigns and of great men, as evinced by the Kingstowns, Queenstowns, Princetowns, the Delawares, the Jerseys, and the Wellingtons. Equally natural is it, as local history grows, to honor the names of people on the spot, native allies such as Pontiac or an Oshkosh, or patriot leaders, a Washington, a Jefferson, a Dorchester. As time goes on and earlier affections dim, as the demand for business convenience outweighs the romance of history, there appear First Avenue and all that follows, crossing First Street as a system as endless as infinite space and about as interesting. This atrocious system sacrifices all that goes with words — memory, affection, association, and individuality — for the mere convenience of number. It sacrifices history to help an expressman deliver a parcel. We might as well call London No. 1 and Liverpool No. 2 and the Right Reverend William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, by his census number at birth, 36,051,328. It is shorter and more exact than his present long and clumsy designation. There would be no mistaking him.
The system, discovered in America, has run across the United States and invaded the Canadian North West, a community always determined to be at one and the same time as up to date as the United States and as out of date as Great Britain. But most Canadian cities still keep thinking out names till weary fancy, in their outer rings, fades out into the names of last year’s aldermen.
Oddly enough the latest Montreal maps of the latest area of streets laid out, partly inside, partly outside the city’s limits, show a list of avenues running from “première avenue” up to 39ème avenue, and a list of streets running up to “trente-quatrième rue.” But in French “trente-quatrième rue” doesn’t mean Thirty-fourth Street, as a title. It just means that this is the thirty-fourth street. They will think out a name later on, perhaps Jacques Cartier.
The Montreal street names are of peculiar interest, for here we find the contrast of saints and sinners, of French and English, of “bygone history” and present endeavor, of the passing hour and of things eternal. From Athlone Avenue of Outer Montreal we may pass to Laurier Avenue, to Peel Street; we descend to Victoria Square, to McGill, and then by a procession of saints to the street of Notre Dame de Bonsecours.
In Montreal the concentric rings of growth are not to be distinguished until we first separate out the old town, all laid out in one period, all French and nearly all sacred. St. James Street is of course only a translation of Rue St. Jacques.
Where the old French town ends we find the name McGill Street, but it was no part of early Montreal, being only created when the fortification walls were knocked down long after the conquest (1803) and the new fathers of the city — there was a James McGill and a Peter and an Andrew — were gratefully remembered, in the names of its street, or took care to remember themselves. McGill was not named by James, who was dead (1813) before it was made.
But before the walls were demolished new streets were being named or old roads renamed in the suburbs outside the original town. Close by, and all three together, appear the men of the conquest — Wolfe, Montcalm, and Amherst — all side by side. Amherst afterward rose, or sank, to be a streetcar as well. So also did the Duke of Wellington, whose name was given to the long street running out through the old St. Ann suburb. But even before him the early governors, Lord Dorchester and St. James Craig, were commemorated in the new streets outside the old town and running, as we now call it, east and west. Dorchester, as was right, received the fairest portion, the beautiful road along the hill. Craig got the marsh, long a blot on Montreal, filled, even when a street, with the refuse thrown into it, flooded in springtime even within present memory, yet waiting for a glorious resurrection under the new city planning in which in Montreal as in other cities the last shall be first and the slum become sublime.
The Rebellion Days of 1837 and 1838 left their grim writing on the streets with the Place des Patriotes, where their scaffold stood, and the streets Delorimier, Sanguinet, Robert, Hamelin, named after the men executed. A higher honor is evidenced in the long Papineau Avenue traversing the city in that quarter. More grudging is Colborne Street, short and narrow, near McGill Street, in what had been at the other end of the town. Durham failed to qualify. The Durham Avenue of today, away out near the Rivière des Prairies, is just an act of forgiveness, a gesture toward the past.
The Victorian Age breaks out vigorously in the new advance of the city over ground still largely empty when the Queen began to reign, which climbed Beaver Hall Hill and moved south and west. Here is Victoria Square (though not so named till 1860) and Windsor Street and Peel, just where they should be. The war scare of 1845 gave Cathcart, the Crimean War, Sebastopol. On the French side the outward-moving rings are less clearly marked, the names of the men of the hour standing in competition with the eternal glory of the saints and with the pride of history never tired of recalling Cartier and Maisonneuve. Jacques Cartier is a parliamentary riding, a street, a square, a pier, and was a whole town, “Cartierville,” as was Maisonneuve, till the city absorbed them both. Carrier reappears in the new bridge.
But the English names keep climbing steadily on. Anyone who knows our history since Confederation could guess exactly where to find Gladstone Avenue, Lansdowne Avenue, and Aberdeen, how far to go to look for Lord Grey. The Duke of Connaught had long since qualified in his youthful, soldierly days in the Montreal Garrison and gave us the Prinsse Árthur — Prinsse Arthúr of the Park Avenue streetcar call. He reappeared triumphantly in an avenue, in Montreal West, as the wartime Governor General with his daughter on Patricia Avenue beside him. Joffre and Pau got honorable mention at the same epoch but at the very opposite end of the city. Foch, as who should say, “made” Verdun; Pétain, luckily nothing. But before this, between Prince Arthur’s time and that of the Duke of Wellington’s, the belt of the Macdonalds and the Tuppers, the Strathconas and the Lauriers carry out our history till the end with all honor in the outer ring of Athlone in the town of Mount Royal.
A few streets, not many, recall in Montreal the great names of English and French literature, but with no great honor. Shakespeare is an empty road, Milton a dingy side street, Dickens and Thackeray are outside the limits, near the streets still waiting for names, Burns not even there. Along with Dickens and Thackeray are Taine and Racine and Ruskin in a new district that has presumably just heard of them. The addition of Hugo, Dryden, and Milton makes this municipality of St. Michel de Laval look like the Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. All honor to it for its rescue of authorship. Chateaubriand, champion of the church, has a real avenue nearly three miles long, Molière a street one block in length, and Jules Verne one with three blocks. Most of the literary names seem an afterthought; Montreal was too busy and had so much history of its own, and, after all, other cities are just as bad.
Thus lies Montreal, in two languages, from the Victoria Bridge to the Pont Jacques Cartier repeating its civic official motto, Concordia Salus, Our Salvation is in Concord.
FOOTNOTES:
L. de Montigny, La Langue Française au Canada, 1916.
A. Rivard, Bibliographie du Parler Français au Canada, 1906.
W. P. Percival, Education in Quebec, 1941.
CHAPTER XIV. McGill University
Under the Ginkgo Tree. He’s Our Father, Oh Yes, Rather. McGill, Its Campus and Its Corpus. Foundation and Stagnation. Sir William Dawson and His Work. Marvelous Growth and Progress of McGill. World Fame of Its Medicine and Applied Science. Scope of Its Work. Men Not Mortar. The University of Montreal. Its Fine Classical Training. Music, Arts, and Letters on Montreal.
NO APOLOGY IS needed for devoting the larger part of a chapter of this book to the discussion of McGill University. Its great success in the past and the reputation which it enjoys throughout the whole world, especially as a school of medicine and engineering, would make it natural that readers would wish to know something of it. One who looks back gratefully to thirty-six years spent in its service and six years of leaning upon it in old age, without having ever contributed to its medical and engineering reputation, may perhaps be a fitting person to bear witness.
The grounds of McGill University are beautifully situated in what is, in a sense, the center of Montreal, the slope at the base of the mountain running straight down toward the river. Unlike many colleges buried in commercial cities, it has the great advantage that it can be seen all at once; not really all of it, but enough to give the finished picture of a college and a campus, the oldest building, of the greatest dignity, recognizable at once as such at the top of the slope. The newer buildings, magnificent in size, frame the sides of the campus. All the central open space is a playground dotted with great trees, pierced with a central avenue of tall elms and maples, running up through the beautiful Roddick Gates from Sherbrooke Street below. The trees verge already on a hundred years of age. The photographs of past days show them as slender little saplings when all Montreal made merry at the visit of the gay young Prince of Wales in 1860. The old building at the top is the Arts Building, battered, renewed, built over, pinned under, having lost everything but its beauty. Again and again common sense whispered, “Knock it down; build it like Pittsburgh, fifty stories high . . . stick elevators into it to make it like Columbia. This thing begins to look like those old places in Oxford.” But no one ever dared to. It was the old dilemma, the old problem as between affection and change, continuity or a new start. So there it stays.
Before the Arts Building, at the front steps, is James McGill’s grave, with a strange tree, a ginkgo tree, weeping over it, if such a tree as a ginkgo can indeed weep. This grave seemed so incongruous, years ago, that they let the bushes grow around the foot of the ginkgo, and James McGill slept like the beauty in the fairy tale, hidden behind the leaves, his gravestone moldered and illegible. It was forgotten that he was there; the records said that he was buried in 1813 in the Dorchester Street Burying Ground. Then an energetic dean — from the States, and hence careless of antiquity — had an opening cut in the bushes and the gravestone scraped and the letters rebuilt, and there it was, the original epitaph of eulogy of James McGill’s loyalty to his Sovereign and ability, integrity, industry and zeal as a magistrate. To this was added, This Monument and the remains which it covers were removed from the Old Protestant Cemetery, Dorchester Street, and placed here in grateful remembrance of the Founder of this University, 23rd June, 1875.
So now the students on their evenings of merriment sing, —
James McGill, James McGill, Peacefully he slumbers there, Though he knows we’re on the tear, He’s our father Oh yes, rather, James McGill!!!!!
Yet they do say he’s not there at all; that he was meant to be there but was never moved. Some day another American dean may come and exhume him. Till then we cannot know. It is probable that this legend of McGill not occupying his own grave arose from the fact — if one may be pardoned for referring to such grim details of the record — that James McGill is not all there and never was. Only the “skull and a few of the greater bones and the bottom of the coffin” were left to remove in 1875.
The Arts Building is all filled with classrooms, even the left-hand end of it that was once the Assembly Hall and Library given by William Molson at the time of the same royal visit. But the right-hand end, as you face it, is the Administration, renovated from what was once pantries, kitchens, cellars, attempts at chemistry, as inconvenient, crooked, and impossible as anything in London. Above it is housed the Law Faculty, crookeder still, fit to compare with any Inns of Court. Scattered through the building are all sorts of little odd offices for things left out of the main buildings, such as the principal of McGill and the registrar and offices that in American colleges would cover an acre.
