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cannot say how deeply it touched me to learn that Pauline
Johnson expressed a wish on her deathbed that I, living
here in the mother country all these miles away, should
write something about her. I was not altogether surprised,
however, for her letters to me had long ago shed a golden
light upon her peculiar character. She had made herself
believe, quite erroneously, that she was largely indebted
to me for her success in the literary world. The letters
I had from her glowed with this noble passion: the delusion
about her indebtedness to me, in spite of all I could
say, never left her. She continued to foster and cherish
this delusion. Gratitude indeed was with her not a sentiment
merely, as with most of us, but a veritable passion.
And when we consider how rare a human trait true gratitude
is—the one particular characteristic in which
the lower animals put us to shame—it can easily
be imagined how I was touched to find that this beautiful
and grand Canadian girl remained down to the very last
moment of her life the impersonation of that most precious
of all virtues. I [Page vii] have seen
much of my fellow men and women, and I never knew but
two other people who displayed gratitude as a passion—indulged
in it, I might say, as a luxury—and they were
both poets. I can give no higher praise to the “irritable
genius.” On this account Pauline Johnson will
always figure in my memory as one of the noblest minded
of the human race.
Circumstances made my personal
knowledge of her all too slight. Our spiritual intimacy,
however, was very strong, and I hope I shall be pardoned
for saying a few words as to how our friendship began.
It was at the time of Vancouver’s infancy, when
the population of the beautiful town of her final adoption
was less than a twelfth of what it now is, and less
than a fiftieth part of what it is soon going to be.
In 1906 I met her during one
of her tours. How well I remember it! She was visiting
London in company with Mr. McRaye—making a tour
of England—reciting Canadian poetry. And on this
occasion Mr. McRaye added to the interest of the entertainment
by rendering in a perfectly marvellous way Dr. Drummond’s
Habitant poems. It was in the Steinway Hall, and the
audience was enthusiastic. When, after the performance,
my wife and I went into the room behind the stage to
congratulate her, I was quite affected by the warm and
affectionate greeting that I got from her. With moist
eyes she told her friends that she owed her literary
success mainly to me.
And now what does the reader
suppose that I [Page viii] had done
to win all these signs of gratitude? I had simply alluded—briefly
alluded—in the London “Athenæum”
some years before, to her genius and her work. Never
surely was a reviewer so royally overpaid. Her allusion
was to a certain article of mine on Canadian poetry
which was written in 1889, and which she had read so
assiduously that she might be said to know it by heart:
she seemed to remember every word of it.
Now that I shall never see her
face again it is with real emotion that I recur to this
article and to the occasion of it. Many years ago—nearly
a quarter of a century—a beloved friend whom I
still mourn, Norman Maccoll, editor of the “Athenæum,”
sent me a book called “Songs of the Great Dominion,”
selected and edited by the poet, William Douw Lighthall.
Maccoll knew the deep interest I have always taken in
matters relating to Greater Britain, and especially
in everything relating to Canada. Even at that time
I ventured to prophesy that the great romance of the
twentieth century would be the growth of the mighty
world-power of Canada, just as the great romance of
the nineteenth century had been the inauguration of
the nascent power that sprang up among Britain’s
antipodes. He told me that a leading article for the
journal upon some weighty subject was wanted, and asked
me whether the book was important enough to be worth
a leader. I turned over its pages and soon satisfied
myself as to that point. I found the book rich in poetry—true
poetry—by poets some of whom have since then come
to great and world-wide [Page ix] distinction,
all of it breathing, more or less, the atmosphere of
Canada: that is to say Anglo-Saxon Canada. But in the
writings of one poet alone I came upon a new note—the
note of the Red Man’s Canada. This was the poet
that most interested me—Pauline Johnson. I quoted
her lovely canoe song “In the Shadows,”
which will be found on page 72 of this volume. I at
once sat down and wrote a long article, which could
have been ten times as long, upon a subject so suggestive
as that of Canadian poetry.
As it was this article of mine
which drew this noble woman to me, it has, since her
death, assumed an importance in my eyes which it intrinsically
does not merit. I might also say that it has become
sacred to me among my fugitive writings: this is why
I cannot resist the temptation of making a few extracts
from it. It seems to bring the dead poet very close
indeed to me. Moreover, it gives me an opportunity of
re-saying what I then said of the great place Canadian
poetry is destined to hold in the literature of the
English-speaking race. I had often before said in the
“Athenæum,” and in the “Encyclopædia
Britannica” and elsewhere, that all true poetry—perhaps
all true literature—must be a faithful reflex
either of the life of man or of the life of Nature.
Well, this article began by
remarking that the subject of Colonial verse, and the
immense future before the English-speaking poets, is
allied to a question that is very great, the adequacy
or inadequacy of English poetry—British, American,
and [Page x] Colonial—to the
destiny of the race that produces it. The article enunciated
the thesis that if the English language should not in
the near future contain the finest body of poetry in
the world, the time is now upon us when it ought to
do so; for no other literature has had that variety
of poetic material which is now at the command of English-speaking
poets. It pointed out that at the present moment this
material comprises much of the riches peculiar to the
Old World and all the riches peculiar to the New. It
pointed out that in reflecting the life of man the English
muse enters into competition with the muse of every
other European nation, classic and modern; and that,
rich as England undoubtedly is in her own historic associations,
she is not so rich as are certain other European countries,
where almost every square yard of soil is so suggestive
of human associations that it might be made the subject
of a poem. To wander alone, through scenes that Homer
knew, or through the streets that were hallowed by the
footsteps of Dante, is an experience that sends a poetic
thrill through the blood. For it is on classic ground
only that the Spirit of Antiquity walks. And it went
on to ask the question, “If even England, with
all her riches of historic and legendary associations,
is not so rich in this kind of poetic material as some
parts of the European Continent, what shall be said
of the new English worlds—Canada, the United States,
the Australias, the South African Settlements, etc.?”
Histories they have, these new countries—in the
development of the human race, in the growth of [Page
xi] the great man, Mankind—histories
as important, no doubt, as those of Greece, Italy, and
Great Britain. Inasmuch, however, as the sweet Spirit
of Antiquity knows them not, where is the poet with
wings so strong that he can carry them off into the
“ampler ether,” the “diviner air”
where history itself is poetry?
Let me repeat here, at risk
of seeming garrulous, a few sentences in that article
which especially appealed to Pauline Johnson, as she
told me:
“Part
and parcel of the very life of man is the sentiment
about antiquity. Irrational it may be, if you will,
but never will it be stifled. Physical science strengthens
rather than weakens it. Social science, hate it as
it may, cannot touch it. In the socialist, William
Morris, it is stronger than in the most conservative
poet that has ever lived. Those who express wonderment
that in these days there should be the old human playthings
as bright and captivating as ever—those who
express wonderment at the survival of all the delightful
features of the European raree-show—have not
realised the power of the Spirit of Antiquity, and
the power of the sentiment about him—that sentiment
which gives birth to the great human dream about hereditary
merit and demerit upon which society—royalist
or republican—is built. What is the use of telling
us that even in Grecian annals there is no kind of
heroism recorded which you cannot match in the histories
of the United States and Canada? What is the use of
telling us that the travels of Ulysses and of Jason
are as nothing in point of real romance compared with
Captain Phillip’s voyage to the other side of
the world, when he led his little convict-laden fleet
to [Page xii] Botany Bay—a
bay as unknown almost as any bay in Laputa—that
voyage which resulted in the founding of a cluster
of great nations any one of whose mammoth millionaires
could now buy up Ilium and the Golden Fleece combined
if offered in the auction mart? The Spirit of Antiquity
knows not that captain. In a thousand years’
time, no doubt, these things may be as ripe for poetic
treatment as the voyage of the Argonauts; but on a
planet like this a good many changes may occur before
an epic poet shall arise to sing them. Mr. Lighthall
would remind us, did we in England need reminding,
that Canada owes her very existence at this moment
to a splendid act of patriotism—the withdrawal
out of the rebel colonies of the British loyalists
after the war of the revolution. It is ‘the
noblest epic migration the world has ever seen,’
says Mr. Lighthall, ‘more loftily epic than
the retirement of Pius Æneas from Ilion.’
Perhaps so, but at present the dreamy Spirit of Antiquity
knows not one word of the story. In a thousand years’
time he will have heard of it, possibly, and then
he will carefully consider those two ‘retirements’
as subjects for epic poetry.”
The
article went on to remark that until the Spirit of Antiquity
hears of this latter retirement and takes it into his
consideration, it must, as poetic material, give way
to another struggle which he persists in considering
to be greater still—the investment by a handful
of Achaians of a little town held by a handful of Trojans.
It is the power of this Spirit of Antiquity that tells
against English poetry as a reflex of the life of man.
In Europe, in which, as Pericles said, “The whole
earth is the tomb of illustrious men,” the Spirit
of Antiquity is omnipotent. [Page xiii]
The article then discussed the
main subject of the argument, saying how very different
it is when we come to consider poetic art as the reflex
of the life of Nature. Here the must of Canada ought
to be, and is, so great and strong. It is not in the
old countries, it is in the new, that the poet can adequately
reflect the life of Nature. It is in them alone that
he can confront Nature’s face as it is, uncoloured
by associations of history and tradition. What Wordsworth
tried all his life to do, the poets of Canada, of the
Australias, of the Cape, have the opportunity of doing.
How many a home-bounded Englishman must yearn for the
opportunity now offered by the Canadian Pacific Railway
of seeing the great virgin forests and prairies before
settlement has made much progress—of seeing them
as they existed before even the foot of the Red Man
trod them—of seeing them without the physical
toil which only a few hardy explorers can undergo. It
is hard to realise that he who has not seen the vast
unsettled tracts of the British Empire knows Nature
only under the same aspect as she has been known by
all the poets from Homer to our own day. And when I
made the allusion to Pauline Johnson’s poems which
brought me such reward, I quoted “In the Shadows.”
The poem fascinated me—if fairly haunted me. I
could not get it out of my head; and I remember that
I was rather severe on Mr. Lighthall for only giving
us two examples of a poet so rare—so full of the
spirit of the open air.
Naturally I turned to his introductory
remarks to see who Pauline Johnson was. I was not at
all [Page xiv] surprised to find that
she had Indian blood in her veins, but I was surprised
and delighted to find that she belonged to a famous
Indian family—the Mohawks of Brantford. The Mohawks
of Brantford! that splendid race to whose unswerving
loyalty during two centuries not only Canada, but the
entire British Empire owes a debt that can never be
repaid.
After the appearance of my article
I got a beautiful letter from Pauline Johnson, and I
found that I had been fortunate enough to enrich my
life with a new friendship.
And now as to the genius of
Pauline Johnson: it was being recognised not only in
Canada, but all over the great Continent of the West.
Since 1889 I have been following her career with a glow
of admiration and sympathy. I have been delighted to
find that this success of hers had no damaging effect
upon the grand simplicity of her nature. Up to the day
of her death her passionate sympathy with the aborigines
of Canada never flagged, as shown by such poems as “The
Cattle Thief” (page 12), “The Pilot of the
Plains” (page 9), “As Red Men Die”
(page 6), and many another. During all this time, however,
she was cultivating herself in a thousand ways—taking
interest in the fine arts, as witness her poem “The
Art of Alma-Tadema” (page 131). Her native power
of satire is shown in the lines written after Dreyfus
was exiled, called “‘Give us Barabbas’”
(page 117). She had also a pretty gift of vers de
société, as seen in her lines “Your
Mirror Frame” (page 119). [Page xv]
Her death is not only a great
loss to those who knew and loved her: it is a great
loss to Canadian literature and to the Canadian nation.
I must think that she will hold a memorable place among
poets in virtue of her descent and also in virtue of
the work she has left behind, small as the quantity
of that work is. I believe that Canada will, in future
times, cherish her memory more and more, for of all
Canadian poets she was the most distinctly a daughter
of the soil, inasmuch as she inherited the blood of
the great primeval race now so rapidly vanishing, and
of the greater race that has supplanted it.
In reading the description of
the funeral in the “News-Advertiser,” I
was specially touched by the picture of the large crowd
of silent Red Men who lined Georgia Street, and who
stood as motionless as statues all through the service,
and until the funeral cortège had passed on the
way to the cemetery. This must have rendered the funeral
the most impressive and picturesque one of any poet
that has ever lived.
THEODORE
WATTS-DUNTON.
THE PINES,
PUTNEY HILL.
20th August, 1913.
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