| The
writer, having contributed a brief “Appreciation”
of the late Miss E.
Pauline Johnson to the July number of The Canadian
Magazine, has been asked by the editor of this
collection of her hitherto unpublished writings to allow
it to be used as a Preface, with such additions or omissions
as might seem desirable. He has not yet seen any portion
of the book, but quite apart from its merits it is eagerly
looked for by Miss Johnson’s many friends and
admirers as a final memorial of her literary life. It
will now be read with an added interest, begot of her
painfully sad and untimely
end.
In the death of Miss Johnson
a poet passed away of undoubted genius; one who wrote
with passion, but without extravagance, and upon themes
foreign, perhaps, to some of her readers, but, to herself,
familiar as the air she breathed.
When her radical poetry first
appeared, its effect upon the reader was as that of
something abnormal, something new and strange, and certainly
unexampled in Canadian verse. For here was a girl whose
blood and sympathies were largely drawn from the greatest
tribe of the most [Page 9] advanced
nation of Indians on the continent, who spoke out, “loud
and bold,” not for it alone, but for the whole
red race, and sang of its glories and its wrongs in
strains of poetic fire.
However aloof the sympathies
of the ordinary business world may be from the red man’s
record, even it is moved at times by his fate, and stirred
by his persistent, his inevitable romance. For the Indian’s
record is the background, and not seldom the foreground,
of American history, in which his endless contests with
the invader were but a counterpart of the unwritten,
or recorded, struggles of all primitive time.
In that long strife the bitterest
charge against him is his barbarity, which, if all that
is alleged is to be believed—and much of it is
authentic—constitutes in the annals of pioneer
settlement and aggression a chapter of horrors.
But equally vindictive was his
enemy, the American frontiersman. Burnings at the stake,
scalping, and other savageries, were not confined to
the red man. But whilst his are depicted by the interested
writers of the time in the most lurid colours, those
of the frontiersman, equally barbarous, are too often
palliated, or entirely passed by. It is manifestly unjust
to characterize a whole people by its worst members.
Of such, amongst both Indians and whites, there were
not a few; but it is equally unfair to ascribe to a
naturally cruel disposition the infuriated red man’s
reprisals for intolerable wrongs. As a [Page
10] matter of fact, impartial history not seldom
leans to the red man’s side; for, in his ordinary
and peaceful intercourse with the whites, he was, as
a rule, both helpful and humane. In the records of early
explorers we are told of savages who possessed estimable
qualities lamentably lacking in many so-called civilized
men. The Illinois, an inland tribe, exhibited such tact,
courtesy and self-restraint, in a word, such good manners,
that the Jesuit Fathers described them as a community
of gentlemen. Such traits, indeed, were natural to the
primitive Indian, and gave rise, no doubt, to the much-derided
phrase—“The Noble Red Man.”
There may be some readers of
these lines old enough to remember the great Indians
of the plains in times past, who will bear the writer
out in saying that such traits were not uncommon down
to comparatively recent years. Tatonkanazin the Dahcota,
Sapo-Maxika the Blackfoot, Atakakoop the Cree, not to
speak of Yellow Quill and others, were noted in their
day for their noble features and dignified deportment.
In our history the Indians hold
an honoured place, and the average reader need not be
told that, at one time, their services were essential
to Canada. They appreciated British justice, and their
greatest nations produced great men, who, in the hour
of need, helped materially to preserve our independence.
They failed, however, for manifest reasons, to maintain
their own. They [Page 11] had to yield;
but, before quitting the stage, they left behind them
an abiding memory, and an undying tradition. And, thus,
“Romanticism,” which will hold its own despite
its hostile critics, is their debtor. Their closeness
to nature, their picturesque life in the past, their
mythical religion, social system and fateful history
have begot one of the wide world’s “legends,”
an ideal not wholly imaginary, which, as a counterpoise
to Realism, our literature needs, and probably never
shall outgrow.
These references to the Indian
character may seem too extended for their place, yet
they are genre to the writer’s subject.
For Miss Johnson’s mentality was moulded by descent,
by ample knowledge of her people’s history, admiration
of their character, and profound interest in their fate.
Hence the oncoming into the
field of letters of a real Indian poet had a significance
which, aided by its novelty, was immediately appreciated
by all that was best in Canadian culture. Hence, too,
and by reason of its strength, her work at once took
its fitting place without jar or hindrance; for there
are few educated Canadians who do not possess, in some
measure, that aboriginal, historic sense which was the
very atmosphere of Pauline Johnson’s being.
But whilst “the Indian”
was never far from her thoughts, she was a poet, and
therefore inevitably winged her way into the world of
art, into [Page 12] the realm common
to all countries, and to all peoples. Here there was
room for her imaginings, endowed, as she was, with power
to appeal to the heart, with refinement, delicacy, pathos,
and, above all, sincerity; an Idealist, who fused the
inner and the outer world, and reveled in the unification
of scenery and mind.
The delight of genius in the
act of composition has been called the keenest of intellectual
pleasures; and this was the poet’s almost sole
reward in Canada a generation ago, when nothing seemed
to catch the popular ear but burlesque, or trivial verse.
In strange contrast this with a remoter age! In old
Upper Canada, in its primitive days, there was no lack
of educated men and women, of cultivated pioneers who
appreciated art and good literature in all its forms.
Even the average immigrant brought his favourite books
with him from the Old Land, and cherished a love of
reading, which unfortunately was not always inherited
by his sons. It was a fit audience, no doubt; but in
a period when all alike were engrossed in a stern struggle
for existence, the poets, and we know there were some,
were forced, like other people, to earn, by labour of
hand, their daily bread. Thackeray’s “dapper”
George is credited with the saying, that, “If
beebles will be boets they must starve.” If in
England their struggle was severe, in Canada it was
unrelenting; a bald prospect, certainly, which lasted,
one is sorry to say, far down in our literary history.
[Page 13]
Probably owing to this, and
partly through advice, and partly by inclination, Miss
Johnson took to the public platform for a living, and
certainly justified her choice of vocation by her admirable
performances. They were not sensational, and therefore
not over-attractive to the groundling; but to discerners,
who thought highly of her art, they seemed the perfection
of monologue, graced by a musical voice, and by gesture
at once simple and dignified.
As this is an appreciation and
a tribute to Miss Johnson’s memory rather than
a criticism, the writer will touch but lightly upon
the more prominent features of her productions. Without
being obtrusive, not the least of these is her national
pride, for nothing worthier, she thought, could be said
of a man than
“That
he was born in Canada, beneath the British flag.”
In her political
creed wavering and uncertainty had no place. She saw
our national life from its most salient angles, and,
in current phrase, she saw it whole. In common, therefore,
with every Canadian poet of eminence, she had no fears
for Canada, if she be but true to herself.
Another
opinion is not likely to be challenged, viz., that much
of her poetry is unique, not only in subject, but also
in the sincerity of her treatment of themes so far removed
from the common range. Intense feeling distinguishes
her Indian [Page 14] poems from all
others; they flow from her very veins, and are stamped
with the seal of heredity. This strikes one at every
reading, and not less their truth to fact, however idealized.
Indeed the wildest of them, “Ojistoh” (The
White Wampum), is based upon an actual occurrence, though
the incident took place on the Western plains, and the
heroine was not a Mohawk. The same intensity marks “The
Cattle Thief,” and “A Cry From an Indian
Wife.” Begot of her knowledge of the long-suffering
of her race, of iniquities in the past and present,
they poured red-hot from her inmost heart.
One turns, however, with a sense
of relief from those fierce dithyrambics to the beauty
and pathos of her other poems. Take, for example, that
exquisite piece of music, “The Lullaby of the
Iroquois,” simple, yet entrancing! Could anything
of its kind be more perfect in structure and expression?
Or the sweet idyll, “Shadow River,” a transmutation
of fancy and fact, which ends with her own philosophy:
“O
pathless world of seeming!
O pathless life of mine whose deep ideal
Is more my own than ever was the real.
For others fame
And Love’s red flame,
And yellow gold: I only claim
The shadows and the dreaming.”
And this
ideality, the hall-mark of her poetry, has a character
of its own, a quality which distinguishes [Page
15] it from the general run of subjective verse.
Though of the Christian faith, there is yet an almost
pagan yearning manifest in her work, which she indubitably
drew from her Indian ancestry. That is, she was in constant
contact with nature, and saw herself, her every thought
and feeling, reflected in the mysterious world around
her.
This
sense of harmony is indeed the prime motive of her poetry,
and therein we discern a brightness, a gleam, however
fleeting, of mystic light—
“The
light that never was on sea or land,
The consecration and the poet’s dream.”
A
suggestion of her attitude and sense of interpretation
lurks in this stanza:
“There’s
a spirit on the river, there’s a ghost upon
the shore,
And they sing of love and loving through the starlight
evermore,
As they steal amid the silence and the shadows of
the shore.”
And in the
following verses this “correspondence” is
more distinctly drawn:
“O
soft responsive voices of the night,
I join your minstrelsy,
And call across the fading silver light
As something calls to me;
I may not all your meaning understand,
But I have touched your soul in Shadow Land.”
[Page 16]
“Sweetness
and light” met in Miss Johnson’s nature,
but free from sentimentality; and even a carping critic
will find little to cavil at in her productions. If
fault should be found with any of them it would probably
be with such a narrative as “Wolverine.”
It “bites,” like all her Indian pieces,
and conveys a definite meaning. But, written in the
conventional slang of the frontier, it jars with her
other work, and seems out of form, if not out of place.
However,
no poet escapes a break at times, and Miss Johnson’s
work is not to be judged, like a chain, by its weakest
links. Its beauty, its strength, its originality are
unmistakable, and although, had she lived, we might
have looked for still higher flights of her genius,
yet what we possess is beyond price, and fully justifies
the feeling, everywhere expressed, that Canada has lost
a true poet.
Such a loss may not be thought
a serious one by the sordid man who decries poetry as
the useless product of an art already in its decay.
Should this ever be the case, it would be a monstrous
symptom, a symptom that the noblest impulses of the
human heart are decaying also. The truth is, as the
greatest of English critics, Hazlitt, has told us, that
“poetry is an interesting study, for this reason,
that it relates to whatever is most interesting in human
life. Whoever, therefore, has a contempt for poetry,
has a contempt for himself and humanity.” [Page
17]
Turning from Miss Johnson’s
verse to her prose, there is ample evidence that, had
she applied herself, she would have taken high rank
as a writer of fiction. Her “Legends of Vancouver”
is a remarkable book, in which she relates a number
of Coast-Indian myths and traditions with unerring insight
and literary skill. These legends had a main source
in the person of the famous old Chief, Capilano, who,
for the first time, revealed them to her in Chinook,
or in broken English, and, as reproduced in her rich
and harmonious prose, belong emphatically to what has
been called “The literature of power.” Bound
together, so to speak, in the retentive memory of the
old Chief, they are authentic legends of his people,
and true to the Indian nature. But we find in them,
also, something that transcends history. Indefinable
forms, earthly and unearthly, pass before us in mystical
procession, in a world beyond ordinary conception, in
which nothing seems impossible.
The origin of the Indian’s
myths, East or West, cannot be traced, and must ever
remain a mystery. But from his immemorial ceremonies
and intense conservatism, we may reasonably infer that
many of them have been handed down from father to son,
unchanged, from the prehistoric past to the present
day; a past contemporary, perhaps, with the mastodon,
but certainly far back in the mists of antiquity. The
importance of rescuing them from oblivion is plain enough,
[Page 18] and therefore the untimely
death of Miss Johnson, who was evidently turning with
congenital fitness to the task, is doubly to be regretted.
For as Mr. Bernard McEvoy well says in his preface to
her “Vancouver Legends,” she “has
linked the vivid present with the immemorial past .
. . . In the imaginative power that she has brought
to these semi-historic Sagas, and in the liquid flow
of her rhythmical prose she has shown herself to be
a literary worker of whom we may well be proud.”
It is believed to be the general
wish of Miss Johnson’s friends that some tribute
of national and permanent character should be paid to
her memory; not indeed to preserve it—her own
works will do that—but as a visible mark of public
esteem. In this regard, what could be better than a
bronze statue of life-size, with such accompanying symbols
as would naturally suggest themselves to a competent
artist? Vancouver, in which she spent her latter years,
the city she loved, and in which she died, is its proper
home; and, as to its site, the spot in Stanley Park
where she wished her ashes
to be laid is surely, of all places, the most appropriate.
But whatever shape, in the opinion
of her friends, the memorial
should take, it is important, in any case, that it should
be worthy of her genius, and a fitting memento of her
services to Canadian letters.
Fort
Steele, B.C., September, 1913. [Page 19]
|
