I cannot say how deeply it touched me to learn that Pauline Johnson
expressed a wish on her death-bed 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 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 genus."
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 had done to win all
these signs of gratitude? I had simply alluded--briefly alluded--in
the London "Athenaeum" 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 "Athenaeum," 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 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 in 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 almost 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 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 "Athenaeum," and in the "Encyclopaedia
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 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 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 the 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 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
AEneas 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.
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 muse 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 that 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--it 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 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", "The Pilot of the Plains", "As Red Men Die",
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". Her native power of
satire is shown in the lines written after Dreyfus was exiled,
called "'Give us Barabbas'". She had also a pretty gift of vers de
societe, as seen in her lines "Your Mirror Frame".
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 cortege 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.