Flint and Feather

by Charlotte Gray

  During her early days in London, Pauline methodically learned the city’s geography as she walked around Knightsbridge, Mayfair and Chelsea delivering her letters. She called on two former Governors General, both of whom had visited the Johnson family in its glory days at Chiefswood. The first was the elderly Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, who had come in 1874; the second was the Marquess of Lorne, with his wife, Princess Louise, whom she had met in 1879. She left her card at the mansion of Mr. Edward Piggott, Deputy Lord Chamberlain of London, along with a letter from the Reverend Professor William Clark, the amiable Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy at Trinity College in Toronto. As she trudged around, she became progressively more discouraged. “The boy in buttons at the stairway perceptibly elevated his nose as he enquired what and who we wanted,” she later wrote. “The footman, resplendent in the glory of gold braid and pompous consciousness of his own importance gave us a stony British stare.” Too many of her evenings during her first week or two in London were spent by herself in her attic room, missing family and friends. A letter from Harry O’Brien arrived, advising her that “what is gained without a struggle is not so much worth the having.” She shed a tear at the sight of his writing, but she took the advice to heart. “The words did me good,” she acknowledged in her reply.

  Sir Charles Tupper, the former Premier of Nova Scotia and future Prime Minister of Canada, welcomed Pauline to London.

  Two individuals proved to be the most useful allies in Pauline’s campaign to conquer London. The first was Sir Charles Tupper, the ebullient Maritimer and former Premier of Nova Scotia who was currently serving as Canada’s representative in London. (In 1896, he would be summoned home to become Prime Minister of Canada, then would lead the federal Conservatives to defeat in the 1896 election.) Sir Charles could never resist a pretty face; he was a well-known womanizer whose nickname back home in Nova Scotia was “the Ram of Northumberland.” He invited Pauline to the annual Dominion Day celebration at the Westminster Palace Hotel. There, Pauline was welcomed into the small but lively colony of Canadians in London. After several days’ exposure to buttoned-down Brits, Pauline revelled in the company of her fellow countrymen. “We Canadians laugh so much more than the people here,” she wrote to Harry. The second ally was the Earl of Aberdeen, Britain’s representative in Canada, who had admired Pauline’s performance in Ottawa the previous year. Through him, Pauline secured an invitation to tea with Lady Ripon, wife of Britain’s Colonial Secretary and one of London’s most intelligent and celebrated hostesses. Over six feet tall, Lady Ripon entertained, according to her contemporary E. F. Benson, “with a touch of that apotheosized Bohemianism of which nobody else ever quite had the secret.” The encounter between the tall and overwhelmingly grand Lady Ripon, sparkling with diamonds and bons mots, and the small, slender Canadian in her slightly outdated Brantford tea gown, makes a beguiling picture. But Pauline was obviously at her most charming and ladylike in Lady Ripon’s Bruton Street drawing room. A few days later, the summons for which Pauline longed arrived at 25 Portland Street. Lady Ripon would like Pauline to attend her next dinner party and recite some of her poetry afterwards. London Society would at last have the opportunity to inspect “the Mohawk poet.”

  By now, Pauline had realized that upper-crust Londoners were intrigued by her Indian ancestry. Buffalo Bill Cody had already toured England, putting on spectacular open-air shows with his troupe of hundreds of cowboys and Indians, and sparking British interest in “Redskins” in buckskin and feathers. But Pauline offered a new angle on North American natives. She was the first female “Redskin” to appear; Buffalo Bill included no Indian women in his troupe. She was the first native North American who claimed both a pedigree and a poetic gift that made her acceptable in the drawing room. She decided to play up to the interest in her Iroquois pedigree. Still, this did not mean dressing in her beads and buckskin for a Society dinner. Although she could never compete with the trappings and tiaras of Society’s grandes dames, her evening gowns passed muster. And a couple of evenings’ exposure to the British aristocracy were all that a mimic like Pauline needed to absorb the la-di-da mannerisms of a duchess.

  In London, Pauline acquired the mannerisms appropriate for aristocratic drawing rooms.

  However, Pauline did not forget her Mohawk heritage as she strove for acceptance in Mayfair. At the Ripons’ dinner, she found herself seated at the immense mahogany dining table between Lord Ripon and the Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons. She gently let rip in the candlelight. “I talked politics and constitution,” she boasted to Harry O’Brien, “and told them there was no government existing save the confederated government of the Iroquois, that Hiawatha was the only statesman who ever solved the problem of perfect government and economy.” The two middle-aged parliamentarians were captivated by this beautiful young woman. She conformed comfortably to their idea of how such a “fine-lookin’ gel” should behave; her manners were as good as those of any young debutante from the Court of St. James’s. Yet she spoke so thrillingly about people they had assumed were savages. Lord Ripon and his guest rarely met anybody at a dinner party whose grandparents, let along parents, hadn’t known each other since childhood. In their circle, families of almost identical backgrounds had intermarried for generations. A woman who was not only the product of such divergent backgrounds but who also juggled with such finesse her two identities—Mohawk and English Canadian—was fascinating. Her subversive political commentary was downright delightful.

  Pauline was secretly amused at the aristocrats’ obvious excitement that “they had got hold of something new to them.” She also managed to tuck into a “disgracefully large dinner” before the party moved into the drawing room for her recital. Lady Ripon was sufficiently pleased with her guests’ reaction to Pauline that she invited the young Canadian to return for a whole evening of readings. “So it seems,” Pauline gloated to Harry, “that notwithstanding my dissertation on states-manship and my unusually large appetite, that I scored a success.”

  Lady Ripon’s drawing room led to more invitations. Pauline formed a lasting friendship with Lady Blake, the Irish-born wife of Sir Henry Austin Blake, who was currently serving as Governor of Ceylon. However, Pauline could see that the route to publication was not through the Ripons and the Blakes. London Society loved novelty because boredom was an occupational hazard for the British aristocracy of this period. Edward, Prince of Wales, set the tone of London’s bon ton, and it was a tone that valued appearance over intellect, entertainment over philanthropy. Each spring, a new sensation emerged to amuse the well-born. One year it was Mrs. Shaw, the American society whistler, who pursed her lips so prettily. Next came Lillie Langtry, who parlayed her classical features and naughty wit into an affair with the Prince himself. Mrs. Langtry, in turn, was supplanted by the French actress Sarah Bernhardt, who was rumoured to travel with a circus of pet cheetahs and to sleep in a coffin lined with pink silk. A home-grown favourite (until he stepped over the line) was Oscar Wilde, who strutted about in silk knee breeches, a green carnation and lilac gloves (carried, never worn) declaiming the new doctrine of aesthetics. In 1894, Pauline found herself in competition with two American poets as the “latest thing.” The first was a fixture of London salons: the flamboyant Californian Joaquin Miller, who strode into ducal houses in boots, spurs and flowing hair. Miller liked to fling a buffalo robe on the Aubusson carpets and declaim his poetry from the horizontal position. The second drawing-room sensation of the season was Paul Lawrence Dunbar, who, according to the Illustrated American, was lionized “not because he is a poet but because he is a negro who writes poetry. A freak is apt to interest London Society.” In Canada, Saturday Night magazine made the sour suggestion that Pauline Johnson was similarly celebrated in the Imperial capital not because she was “a poet of authentic gift,” but because, “being an Indian, she could write at all…Let a man be a poet if he will, but the great thing is that he should be a curiosity. Then, for a day and a night, he may have London a
t his feet.”

  Most of these sensational entertainments soon faded from view. In 1878, the fashionable London magazine Vanity Fair summed up the privileged ennui that afflicted the British aristocracy: “London Society has a high and holy mission. That mission is to amuse itself; and the only amusement it has yet discovered, or ever seems likely to discover, is that of meeting itself…At noon, when the day of Society may be said to begin,…comes the morning walk or ride, followed by luncheon, a drive, dinner, and the evening parties. In none of these is anything like conversation to be found. It would be considered impertinent and presuming for anybody to make a remark exceeding twenty words in length, or including more than one idea.” Pauline might briefly amuse a few members of this selfish little world, but they felt no obligation to help her achieve her ambition.

  The Canadian poet recognized this. “They invite me to their houses as ‘a great American Indian author,’” she admitted to O’Brien, “an astoundingly clever poet, a marvellous new interpreter of verse etc., and I go, and am looked up to, and dined, and wined, and I amount to a little tin god, for the titled people pretend not to literature.” Their philistine gullibility shocked her: “They are good enough to be blinded by my posings, and mistake my fads, my love of race, my Indian politics for exceeding brightness, and the outcome of extreme originality and talent. Bah! And I without enough education to pad my intellect, let alone form the substance…They cannot be clever to be deceived so easily.”

  Pauline needed an entrée into what she called “thinking London” to get her poems published. But all the soigné self-assurance she displayed amongst aristocrats deserted her when she was amongst writers and artists. “The great minds make me feel uncomfortable, illiterate, woefully lacking, terribly ignorant and insufficiently read,” she confided to Harry. “They do not mean to, but they do.” As the days ticked on and she was no closer to getting into print, her spirits drooped and her confidence seeped away: “I feel a worm, a veritable nothing in the critic’s den or the author’s library.” She decided to get her manuscript typed, in the hope that when she eventually met a potential publisher, the poems would have more credibility. But the typist did a terrible job, and Pauline subsequently discovered that no poet worth her or his salt bothered with such irrelevancies.

  It has never been easy for outsiders to penetrate London’s fast-paced cultural life. Moreover, Pauline had arrived in London at a point when the arts were in flux. Crowds still flocked to the old standbys of Victorian theatre—Henry Irving in Shakespearean classics at the Lyceum Theatre, Marie Lloyd in the music halls. Every summer, the Royal Academy was filled with conventional landscapes and portraits. The Romantic poets for whom Pauline had always professed admiration—the early works of Swinburne, Tennyson’s Idylls—remained in print. However, the mid-Victorian taste for melodrama and romance in drama, fiction and poetry was being challenged by the new fin-de-siècle taste for decadence. Queen Victoria remained firmly on the throne, but a younger generation of artists was already caricaturing the moral earnestness of the Victorian era. Writers like Oscar Wilde and Richard Le Galienne suggested that art and morality were separate realms; with behaviour that ranged from perverse through para-doxical to shocking, they insisted on the aesthetic doctrine of “art for art’s sake.” On stage, playwrights like Henrik Ibsen and Sir Arthur Pinero skewered the hypocrisy of nineteenth-century life. George Bernard Shaw was teaching theatregoers, in the words of E. F. Benson, “that plays were not meant to amuse them but to make them think.” An artist like James McNeill Whistler, the American who painted so many of London’s Society beauties, unsettled the establishment with his arrogant combination of genius and disrespect for his patrons.

  The shifting values of cultural life in London were most obvious in get-togethers that took place in artists’ studios. These gatherings were Bohemia’s equivalent of Society’s dinner parties and drawing-room entertainments. Unlike the monosyllabic banalities of drawing rooms, conversation in artists’ studios crackled with conflicting opinions, theatrical monologues, passionate debate and the cross-fertilization of ideas. “Thinking London is so very clever, so far beyond me, so great, so penetrating,” wailed Pauline to Harry O’Brien. Yet this was the milieu she longed to join. She wanted to be accepted as a poet by her peers, rather than as a novelty by “all the lordlings and ladylings in London” who rarely opened a book. “I like my Lord’s presence, though I seek the great thinkers.”

  Through dogged effort, Pauline managed to elbow her way into “thinking London.” A Toronto friend had given her a letter of introduction to Charles Hamilton Aidé, one of Victorian London’s more intriguing personalities. Born in Paris and educated in Bonn, Aidé had served in the British army before publishing his first novel in the 1860s. From then on, according to The Times, he was “one of the people you ‘met everywhere’—at worldly or literary dinner tables, at great receptions and at ‘first nights.’” Multilingual and immensely talented, he published poetry and fiction, wrote successful plays and was an accomplished watercolourist. When Pauline arrived in London, Mr. Aidé—or “Cynicus,” as he styled himself—was adapting a French farce entitled Dr. Bill for a production at the Court Theatre; its risqué subject matter and dialogue caused a furor when it was eventually staged. Aidé lived in an elaborately decorated apartment in Hanover Square, between Bond Street and Regent Street. This allowed him to keep one foot in the swanky Society of Mayfair and the other in the theatrical demi-monde of Soho.

  Perhaps it was Hamilton Aidé’s cosmopolitan background that made him far more open to new voices, and outsiders, than most Londoners. Hospitable and charming, he was best known for the afternoon salons he organized, at which invited guests performed in front of the cultural elite. In early June, Pauline appeared in his Hanover Square drawing room. With Old World courtesy, Aidé ensured an impressive turnout for his New World ingenue. Among those present for Pauline were several artists (including George Frederick Watts, Sir Frederick Leighton, Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Edward Burne-Jones), the novelist Jerome K. Jerome, George Alexander (actor-manager of St. James Theatre) and the literary critic Percy White. None of these men could be said to be particularly avante-garde; most were close to their host in age, and their work fed the mainstream tastes of mid-Victorian life. However, Aidé’s guests were well-known and well-established, and Pauline knew that their good opinion could be valuable. She recited for them all the poems, both nature and Indian, that had won the most applause in the small towns of Ontario. She also performed a dramatization of her story “A Red Girl’s Reasoning,” in which she played the parts of both Christie Robinson, the beautiful young half-Indian woman, and handsome Charlie, the English husband whom she abandons when he refuses to recognize her parents’ marriage.

  Aidé’s friends loved her. Pauline’s poetry, like her conversation at the Ripons’ dinner table, had challenged many of the unthinking assumptions of British imperialism—the superiority of British culture, the intellectual inferiority of natives, the impossibility of bridging a racial gulf. George Alexander (who was sufficiently daring to stage the plays of Oscar Wilde) was so taken with “A Red Girl’s Reasoning” that he considered making a full-length drama out of it. Along with his fellow guests, he decided to promote this young visitor from the colonies. He sent her complimentary tickets to his show at the St. James Theatre. He introduced her to two members of the theatre’s royal family: Herbert Beerbohm Tree, actor-manager of the Haymarket Theatre, and his wife, the actress Helen Maude Holt. Soon there were no more lonely evenings on Portland Street. Pauline received complimentary seats for theatres all over London—for Daly’s Theatre to see Eleanora Duse in La Signora dalle Camelie; for the Lyceum Theatre to see Henry Irving and Ellen Terry in Faust; for the Opéra Comique to see Lillie Langtry in Society Butterfly.

  Just as Pauline had picked up clues on how to perform for Toronto audiences from watching Rosina Voke glide across the stage of the Grand Opera House, so she now educated herself in how to appeal to London au
diences. Inspired by Duse’s and Langtry’s sense of style, Pauline went shopping. On Kensington High Street, there were three big department stores that catered to the desire of the emerging middle class to dress as well (if not as expensively) as London’s grandees. Pauline fingered the silks and satins of the evening gowns in the ladies’ departments of Barker’s, Derry & Tom’s and Ponting’s, eventually settling on a creamy brocade dinner dress from Barker’s, with a

  Barker’s department store on Kensington High Street provided Pauline with a glamorous new wardrobe.

  bustle and a low-cut bodice. She also ordered four ballgowns from a well-regarded (but moderately priced) seamstress on Westbourne Grove. These became the costumes for the second half of her stage performances.

  Thanks to Hamilton Aidé, Pauline gained access to some of the most exotic artists’ salons of the 1890s. Sir Frederick Leighton, the sixty-four-year-old artist who had become President of the Royal Academy in 1878, invited her to walk over to the incredible house he had commissioned for himself on Holland Park Avenue. Leighton House boasted black and gold lacquered woodwork, ornate furnishings and elaborate Corinthian pillars. Its pièce de résistance was the Arab Hall, completely covered in gold and turquoise Turkish tiles, creating the atmosphere of a harem. Pauline was so overcome by the richness of the decor that, on impulse, she presented the bearded patriarch with one of her precious wampum belts. Leighton dashed off a note of thanks to her in which he acknowledged, “My compunction lies in the fact that to you it represents a valuable personal relic, and have therefore some scruple in robbing you of it.” However, the wealthy old man did not return the belt to his impecunious guest, or even send her one of his own sketches in return.