7. _The New Realism._ It was but natural that a reaction should set in against the realistic romance with its insufficiency of motivation and its lack of fidelity to real life. Rather remarkably this arrives in another ten-year cycle and a group of novels published in 1923 show a marked similarity of method and treatment, with widely varied themes and settings. We distinguish this fresh and original attitude as the ‘New Realism’ in Canadian fiction. The strongest of these novels undoubtedly is _The Viking Heart_ by Laura Goodman Salverson. It might be called the epic of the Icelander in Canada, describing as it does the arrival of a party of immigrants in 1870 and following their struggles, hardships, and gradual rise of fortunes to the present day. There is no plot but such as grows out of the record of the lives of the characters. There is no melodrama, but there is the tense drama of the realities of life. The style is chaste, simple, but forceful. Back of it all lies a big theme—‘the price of country’—the realization of citizenship through toil, tears, blood, and sacrifice. The other novels in this group are: _Possession_, by Mazo de la Roche, with its setting a Niagara fruit farm; _Lantern Marsh_, by Beaumont Cornell, following a farm boy through his struggles for an education; _Cattle_, by Onoto Watanna, an almost brutally realistic presentation of a man whose sole aim in life was the acquirement of cattle—as a form of wealth—whose whole outlook on life was measured in terms of cattle; _The Child’s House_, by Marjory MacMurchy, which enters into the heart and mind of a growing little girl. The importance of this movement is that it has cast aside superficialities, that these writers have somehow been able to ‘see things as they are,’ to glimpse the realities of life from their real beginnings—four of the five novels named are actually rooted in ‘the soil’ as their setting and their underlying spiritual foundation. With this foundation of actuality and truth, the writers have gained a clearer and more finished expression. Some of these novels have melodramatic spots; some have other weaknesses, but, on the whole, the effect of this new movement has been to produce novels that have a definite structural unity, that are largely free from irrelevant and insignificant detail, that are written with an economy and aptness of language, and that have more definiteness and depth to their basic themes. CHAPTER XXII The Poetic Dramatists THE POETIC DRAMATISTS OF THE SECOND RENAISSANCE—ARTHUR STRINGER— ROBERT NORWOOD—MARJORIE PICKTHALL, AND OTHERS.