The next important date in Pauline Johnson’s history is the year 1892, when a happy social and literary soirée launched the Indian poet on a public career which, seemingly, would not affect, save negatively, Pauline Johnson’s function and art as a lyrist. From that date and for sixteen years (1892-1908), Miss Johnson assiduously applied her gifts as a reciter and dramatic reader in Canada, the United States, and England, all the while publishing intermittently in the periodical press her best verse.
In 1895, simultaneously at London, England, Boston, and Toronto, appeared her first volume of poems, The White Wampum. In 1903 her second volume of poems, Canadian Born, was issued at Toronto. In 1912, also at Toronto, there was published the definitive and inclusive edition of her collected poems, Flint and Feather. All three, upon their appearance, were highly praised in reviews by the critics of England, the United States, and Canada.
It is important to appreciate the significance of Pauline Johnson’s sixteen years of travelling over Canada, the United States, and England, as a reciter and dramatic reader. Possibly they reduced the amount of her poetic output. But there are no evidences in Flint and Feather that the experiences gained during these years diminished or increased her powers of poetic vision or craftsmanship. Pauline Johnson was self-deceived when, in a letter, she expressed her belief that the fugitive verses published in Flint and Feather, pages 135-156, surpass her poems in The White Wampum and in Canadian Born. ‘My later fugitive verse,’ she declared, ‘is, of course, my best work, as it is more mature.’ There are only fifteen of these so-called fugitive poems; but imaginative, musical, and tender as they are, notably In Grey Days, Autumn’s Orchestra, The Trail to Lillooet, The Lifting of the Mist, The King’s Consort, and Day Dawn, they are all in the early manner of the poet. They are lovely and winning poems, pervaded with seductive music, tone-color pictures of nature and of life, tinged with a tender pathos. But they show no advance in technique, verbal music, imagery, or emotional nuance—no lately acquired powers to express rhythmic ecstasy with a newer and more musical lilt than obtains in The Song My Paddle Sings (1892); or to paint with more suggestive impressionism a nature picture full of color, half-lights, or mystery, or more finely to etch a verbal portrait than she has done in Erie Waters, Marshlands, Shadow River, and Joe; or to catch and envisage a mood or emotional nuance with subtler spirituality than she accomplished in The Camper, Lady Lorgnette, Lullaby of the Iroquois, Prairie Greyhounds, Lady Icicle, and The Prodigal.
All these poems, whose titles have just been quoted, were composed in the decade from 1892 to 1902, and belong to Pauline Johnson’s first two volumes which together contained sixty-seven poems of indubitable lyric and imaginative quality. Of the poems composed by Pauline Johnson in the decade from 1902 to 1912, only twenty-three were deemed by the poet worthy to stand beside her poems from The White Wampum and in Canadian Born which, with the later twenty-three, form the contents of the original edition of Flint and Feather. Five posthumously published poems were added to the later editions.
If, then, in Flint and Feather we discover no advance in the technique of Pauline Johnson’s art, wherein did her new experiences gained by travel, by meeting men and women of foreign lands and by learning the ways of the world, work changes worth while? Solely in the poet’s heart and imagination. Here was a development, not in craftsmanship and art, but in spiritual vision. It was, too, an evolution simple and natural in its stages, and is readily traceable in the poems contained in Flint and Feather. Mr. Melvin O. Hammond, an observant and judicious Canadian critic, in a review of Flint and Feather (The Globe, Toronto, Nov. 9th, 1912), was the first to disclose these stages of Pauline Johnson’s development in spiritual vision. They are four:—
First, Pauline Johnson appeared as the ‘voice’ of the Indian people, who before her coming had been dumb or inarticulate. Her point of view was, at this stage, Indian, and she passionately protested against the abuses the Indians of Canada have suffered (as in The Cattle Thief and A Cry from An Indian Wife) or, as passionately, sang of Indian valor and love (as in her Ojistoh).
Next, her point of view became Canadian. She turned from lamenting the free and glorious past of her Indian ancestors to paint in verse the land of her birth, ‘Canadian life and scenery in the broad outdoors of the North and West,’ not merely impressionistically picturing woods, skies, plains, but also apostrophizing and humanizing both natural creatures and objects, as if they were conscious of their estate, function, and value to man, and had moods of their own, as, for example, The Sleeping Giant (Thunder Bay), and the dainty, fetching lyric The Homing Bee.
The third stage in Miss Johnson’s development in vision was also Canadian. But, in this stage, her point of view became broadened in scope. She turned to remark the progress of the Canadian national spirit and the civilization which binds the Dominion from ocean to ocean. This she accomplished with extraordinary virility in rhythm, with apt descriptive epithet, and with pictorial suggestiveness in her Prairie Greyhounds—a song represented as sung by the trans-continental trains in their passage from East to West, and West to East. The poem gives the reader vivid ideated sensations of the swish and roar and onward rush of the trains, the sweep of the vast territory of the Dominion, and the vision of the Greater Canada that is to be.
The final stage in Pauline Johnson’s increase in scope of spiritual vision was marked by cosmopolitanism, pure humanity, and by mysticism. She had lost the Indian and the Canadian points of view when she composed Give us Barrabas (commemorative of the exile of Dreyfus). She was wholly a human being and sexless when she composed her subtly sympathetic The City and the Sea, and Fasting. She was genuinely mystical when she composed her Penseroso wherein she sang persuasively:—
Soulless is all humanity to me