Once in a fit of mental aberration
I wrote some stanzas to the western wind,
A very stupid, maudlin invocation,
That into ears of audiences I’ve dinned.
I never thought, when grinding out those stanzas,
I’d live to swallow pecks of prairie dust,
That I’d deny my old extravaganzas,
And wish his Majesty distinctly cussed.
The ditty sparked outrage from “Malcolm,” a columnist for the St. Thomas Evening Journal, who considered that it proved that Pauline Johnson was only “masquerading…as a poetess.” Malcolm went on to sneer that “As long as Miss Johnson was content to shine in her own immediate circle of friends it was nobody’s business but her own; but when she lays distinct claims to poetic ability, and is heralded on her English visit as a leading Canadian poetess, her work at least becomes public property.”
Literary spats are always good newspaper fodder, and Pauline had broken a cardinal rule of the Canadian literary community: she didn’t take herself sufficiently seriously. The waspish Evening Journal paragraph was reprinted in The Week. The Week, which had used several poems by Pauline between 1885 and 1889, was the self-styled “Canadian Journal of Politics, Society and Literature” founded by Goldwin Smith in 1883. A heated correspondence ensued. Frank Yeigh rushed to his friend Pauline’s defence, suggesting that Malcolm’s column was “unfair, uncalled for, and undeserved.” He listed the prestigious publications in which Pauline’s work had appeared and the eminent people who had endorsed her poetry. But Malcolm was not the only Canadian critic who found Pauline’s music hall humour déclassé. Another contributor objected to her use of slang (“What a hubbub it would have created had Tennyson foisted these stanzas upon us”). A more tolerant reader urged his fellow correspondents to “admire her for her many good works and forgive her her occasional lapses from the path of literary rectitude.”
It was a relief for Pauline when, in the summer of 1895, The White Wampum finally appeared. Now she had a handsome volume of verse to present as her poetic credentials, rather than simply a collection of dog-eared clippings from the Globe, The Week and Saturday Night.
The London reviews of The White Wampum were mixed. The National Observer considered the volume “pleasant and wholesome, singularly fresh and vigorous, and at once thoughtful and free from all taint of pessimism.” The Sketch acknowledged Miss Johnson as “a pretty poet.” But other comments from the Imperial capital were characterized by a cavalier, often careless reading of the book. The Scotsman declared the narrative poems “gracefully written,” but got Pauline’s gender wrong. The verses, it stated, “do credit to their writer in marking him [sic] out as a Canadian poet in so far as he [sic] is true to the proper history and character of the Dominion.” The Manchester Guardian went further—it got her ancestry wrong: “The idea of posing as an Indian bard cannot be counted among her happiest inspirations…we much prefer the poems in which Miss Johnson, who is, it appears, a Canadian, condescends to touch the humbler lyre of the palefaces.” A third critic (in an anonymous clipping) wearied of all the mentions of “An ancient dying race, strange customs and costumes, fierce passions, barbaric heroisms, long unpronounceable names, tomahawks, Happy Hunting Grounds, canoes, ‘redmen,’ cattle thieves, melodrama and rhetoric.”
Back home, the reception was much warmer. The Canadian Gazette called the book “a charming, if unpretentious collection, [which] suggests that the writer has greater work before her.” The Week’s reviewer wrote that “We have read them all—some more than once—and we have found not a bad or indifferent poem in the collection! No one can fail to be struck with the musical rhythm of her lines, and she has great power of rhyming—no slight accomplishment, and one which we venture to think constitutes a very considerable ornament to English poetry.” In direct rebuke to the cantankerous Malcolm, the reviewer singled out “The Song My Paddle Sings” as “a good example of charming word painting.”
Pauline’s old friend Hector Charlesworth reviewed The White Wampum for the large-circulation Canadian Magazine. Charlesworth was still star-struck by “the charm and power and music” of the “red-skinned muse.” He declared Pauline “the most popular figure in Canadian literature, and in many respects the most prominent one.” He predicted that the “luxurious bibliophile will have something to delight his senses,” thanks to the quality of binding, type and design of The White Wampum. He praised the lyrical poems as striking a “universal note; they have music in them that lingers in one’s ear, and sentiment that grows tuneful in one’s heart.” He wrote that the Indian ballads were “fresh and stimulating to healthy people with dramatic intelligence.”
But even Pauline’s enthusiastic fan had developed reservations about the Indian ballads, which smacked, he said, of “a fine Mohawk barbarity.” Charlesworth was uncomfortable with Pauline’s bias. Like many critics, he objected to the use of art for propaganda purposes. “She is a partisan of the red man,” he explained. “His wrongs burn within her, but in reality one cannot put partisan emotions into poetic bottles with success.” Charlesworth echoed Malcolm’s criticisms about Pauline’s work when he suggested that her work veered towards “melodrama”: “she has marred works that are in essence poetic and strong with mere polemics.”
Like any writer, Pauline brooded over her reviews. She was exasperated that The Sketch had declared that “Longfellow and Whittier have done more for the red-man she loves and champions.” She was affronted by an anonymous comment from London that her poems were made “as the degenerate Redskin has learnt to make his moccasins and snowshoes and even his gods for the European bric-a-brac market.” But she treasured the review in the Manchester Guardian because it suggested her poetry was good enough to be compared to that of Charles G. D. Roberts, the Confederation Poet best known and most admired outside Canada. In 1892, Roberts had described Pauline in the Globe as “the aboriginal voice of Canada by blood as well as by taste and the special trend of her gifts.” Roberts’s praise after her triumphant Toronto debut had reassured Pauline that there was a place for her in the literary establishment. The Manchester Guardian critic reinforced Roberts’s assessment: “Now that Canada has added Miss Johnson to Mr. Roberts, British North America may safely challenge non-British [America] to play it doubles in poetical tennis.”
A few weeks later, Pauline met Charles G. D. Roberts on his home turf, the Maritimes. Pauline and Smily were booked for a series of shows in the east. Their journey to New Brunswick, on the Intercolonial Railroad, took them past mile after mile of the great, grass-covered Tantramar salt marsh, on the upper Bay of Fundy. Roberts himself had immortalized the marsh’s “gossiping grass” and wide red flats “pale with scurf of salt, seamed and baked in the sun” in his poem “Tantramar Revisited.” Like the English poet Thomas Hardy, Roberts wrote unpretentious, beautifully crafted lyrical verses about the day-to-day scenes around him. Pauline was inspired both by his nature poetry and by his insistence that “Beauty clings in common forms!” As the train steamed towards Fredericton, she gazed out at a landscape that, as she wrote in Massey’s Magazine, “is not grand scenery, to some it may not even be distinctive, but it is more than that, it is Roberts. The marshlands are himself, the sea voices, the tides, the sands, the wet salt breath of the margin winds—all are Roberts, and all are his atmosphere.”
This was the first time that Pauline had met Canada’s most famous poet in person, and as the train squealed to a stop, she was overcome with shyness. Roberts had already spent ten years as a full professor of English literature at King’s College, Nova Scotia, and had the kind of literary standing she could only dream of. What would he think of “show people,” especially Owen Smily with his vaudeville humour? But as she and her partner staggered onto the platform, loaded with bags, they heard a cheerful shout of “Welcome” from an untidy man with a thick, tobacco-stained moustache. “We knew him at once,” Pauline recalled, “that eager, tenderly-strong face, that firmly-knit athle
tic figure, that easy Bohemian manner of dress, that happy trick of absolute good fellowship, it was undoubtedly he, of Tantramar, Roberts himself, with as warm a handclasp for us both as though we had all known each other for years.”
Roberts was as struck by Pauline as she was by him—but his admiration was probably more physical in nature. Pauline was the kind of dark-haired beauty that he loved: a notorious philanderer throughout his long career (he died in 1943 aged eighty-three), Roberts would spend most of his life swanning round the world while his wife, May, raised their four children in poverty in Fredericton. At the time of Pauline’s visit, he was involved in several amorous entanglements, including one in his own home, Kingscroft, with his children’s governess, behind May’s back. Perhaps these sordid complications in Kingscroft lay behind Roberts’s insistence that Owen Smily and Pauline must stay at the home of his parents. His father, the Reverend George Goodridge Roberts, was rector of St. Anne’s Church, Fredericton, and a canon at Fredericton Cathedral.
The rector’s family made the two performers completely at home in the sunny, red-brick rectory. Charles’s sister Elizabeth, nicknamed Nain, also wrote poetry and so was thrilled to meet another female poet. In no time at all, Pauline noted, Charles Roberts and “my philistine fellow-artist were addressing each other sans ceremonie, as ‘Old fellow’ and ‘Say, old man,’ which shows that of all things, Roberts is first a man, among men.” Roberts, Pauline realized with pleasure, was far too much a Bohemian to sneer at lighthearted verse. He had little time for Toronto pretensions and he was fun. He once penned a snappy little verse about the humdrum need to make a living under the title “The Poet is Bidden to Manhattan Island.” It began,
Dear Poet, quit your shady lanes
And come where more than lanes are shady.
Leave Phyllis to the rustic swains
And sing some Knickerbocker lady.
And it ended,
You’ve piped at home, where none could pay.
Till now, I trust, your wits are riper.
Make no delay, but come this way,
And pipe for them that pay the piper!
Within a couple of years, Roberts had followed his own doggerel advice and had left New Brunswick’s salt marshes and shady lanes for the salons and shady ladies of Manhattan. There he enlarged his reputation as a poet (and a lady-killer). To augment his income, he wrote animal stories which were based on the careful observation of animal behaviour he had made as a youngster. Before he said good-bye to Pauline in 1895, he gave her two presents that she always treasured: the manuscript copy of his 1893 sonnet sequence, Songs of the Common Day, and the pen with which he had written it. Pauline always felt that she owed Roberts a debt of gratitude because as literary editor of The Week in the 1880s he had included several of her verses in the magazine. She was also flattered that he had sent a letter of introduction on her behalf to the influential New York critic Clarence Edward Stedman. Had she seen the letter, she might have been less impressed. Roberts was more interested in describing her looks, and her respect for him, than her literary achievements: “Our Canadian Mohawk Princess, Pauline Johnson, is going to New York soon, and to see you. She is a devout admirer. I gave her a card to you. Beware, beware, beware! She is charming and a poet!” Pauline never described herself as a princess; the phrase “Indian princess” had already become as much of a bloodless stereotype as the phrase “Indian maiden” against which she had railed in 1892.
Pauline loved Atlantic Canada, with its gentle landscape and historic associations. She was fascinated by the lore and legends of the Miqmaq people. The gentle beauty of the Annapolis Valley bewitched her. Since childhood, she had known by heart Longfellow’s poem Evangeline, about the expulsion of the Acadians, the French who had settled in the Annapolis Valley in the seventeenth century and who were deported by the British in 1755. Now she described the area as teeming “with olden romance as well as luxuriant orchards…The monstrosity of cities has never touched even its margin; it is primitive, melancholy, indescribably placid, faultlessly beautiful and strangely aloof from every other portion of Canada.” On one of her visits east, she met “a typical Blue Nose” (as Maritimers were nicknamed) sauntering along a lane next to an ox cart loaded with apples. He allowed her to climb onto his cartload of apples to be photographed, then urged her (since she liked the valley so much) to remain there. “What have you got here to keep me?” she enquired, and laughed heartily when he replied, “Poetry and pippins.”
But Pauline did not belong in Nova Scotia. Moreover, she was beginning to wonder whether she still belonged in Ontario. She found it easier to stay in touch with her mother by letter than in person. On the long waits at railway stations, or during hot afternoons in some remote, dusty town, she would pull out her navy leather writing case, unclip its brass clasp, remove a piece of paper from one of its pockets and place it on the blotting-paper flap. Then she would dip her nib in a portable inkstand and write an account of her travels. Unhappily, none of Pauline’s letters home have survived, and only a couple of Emily’s wistful replies remain. “My dearest Pauline,” Emily wrote, in a shaky scrawl, to her daughter during these years. “Only a wee note dear this time to thank you for your dear, long, kind letter…I think of you every Sunday in church and often wish you were with me, but I hope the time will come some day. Please give my love to Owen…”
Family politics were not the only frustration for Pauline in Ontario. As the province prospered, its society became more stratified. After 1890, groups of southern Italians, Jews from the Russian Pale, Poles, Slavs, Hungarians and Greeks started to arrive. Most of the immigrants spent their summers working in Northern Ontario’s mines and at railroad sites. Laid off when the snow came, they gravitated to Toronto in the winter, congregating in cheaper neighbourhoods like St. John’s Ward. This rectangular area, squeezed within the grid of College Street and Queen Street, University Avenue and Yonge Street, was soon known simply as “the Ward.” Four out of five of the jerry-built shacks in the Ward were rented from greedy absentee land-lords. In the laneways, Italian and Jewish ragpickers stacked their junk. Barefoot, dirty children splashed through open cesspools. Lacking adequate sewage or water facilities, its boarding houses crammed with Eastern and Southern Europeans, the Ward became a byword for urban squalor. Typhoid, cholera and scarlet fever flourished.
Since the Ward was on the doorstep of some of Toronto’s more affluent neighbourhoods, it was impossible for older, wealthier residents to ignore their city’s changing face. Professors hurrying towards Trinity College dodged peddlers and hurdy-gurdies on the sidewalks. Debutantes strolling under the flowering chestnuts of University Avenue were assailed by the pungent odours of unfamiliar cuisines and bad drains. The same clash between English-speaking families who had settled in Canada at least three generations earlier and these newer, “foreign” immigrants was enacted on a more modest scale in the province’s smaller manufacturing or industrialized towns, like Hamilton and London. But standards of social behaviour for the province were set in Toronto. It didn’t take long for Toronto’s fine old families to close ranks against newcomers, who usually had darker skins, little English, less money and no roots in the British Empire.
By the mid-1890s, Toronto’s upper strata had congealed into an exclusive WASP clique determined, by and large, to defend its position and privileges. It was almost impossible for outsiders to penetrate its inner circles or understand its etiquette. “Mrs. Kirkpatrick’s Wednesdays lose none of their chic and charm,” began Saturday Night’s Social and Personal Column on November 21, 1896, in a description of an At Home given by the wife of the Lieutenant-Governor. “On Wednesday, petite Miss Nordheimer, in a charming little gown of madder red velour, received many welcoming words. The Misses FitzGerald, Mrs. Melfort Boulton, Mrs. McCarthy and Mrs. FitzGibbon, Mrs. and Miss Cattanach, Mrs. Macdonald, Mrs. Duncan Coulson, Miss Skeaff and ever so many more were at Government House.” The grandes dames of this beau monde dictated the conventions to be followe
d at the top of the social pyramid. Their husbands spent their days building up the Dominion’s economy. Their sons followed their fathers into business or the professions; their daughters were groomed to become the wives and mothers of the next generation. They all shared the credo that monetary success and British ancestry were synonymous with moral superiority.
Most well-bred young women spent an inordinate amount of time on their appearances, which were catalogued in excruciating detail by fawning social columnists. “Miss Kathleen Murphy was very pretty in pink silk, and Miss Belle in black, relieved with pale blue velvet,” ran one such column about the 1899 Argonaut Rowing Club dance. “Miss Evelyn Cox wore white satin with violets, and her cousin Miss Beatrice Myles wore pale blue satin. Miss Florrie Patterson wore black net paillette; Miss Heaven wore buttercup mousseline; Miss Bessie Thompson, primrose organdie with entredeux of black lace.” The main events of the social season, such as the St. Andrew’s Day Ball each December, were elaborate mating rituals for the elite. “Toronto is growing a big place,” reported Saturday Night’s Social and Personal Column in December 1896, “for though everyone appeared to be at the ball, I have been surprised since to remember how many were not there.” It is unlikely that the social columnist had in mind residents of the Ward in her sweeping generalization about “everyone.”
Where did Pauline belong in a world increasingly preoccupied with pedigree and black net paillette?. At Lord Ripon’s dining table in London, she had shown that when necessary, she could give the appearance of sliding effortlessly into this world. She had recited her poems to many members of this elite; the more intellectual and literary types within it were her audience. And there were a few others with ancestry similar to hers who had proven acceptable to the social arbiters. Dr. Oronhyatekha, the Mohawk from the Tyendena’ga Reserve who was now the Supreme Chief Ranger of the Foresters, cropped up on society pages, smiling “with calm, classic countenance.”
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