How luminous, translucent, yet graphic and vivid, are all those colorful lines. They are the ‘painting’ of a poet who has, above all things, the eye of the naturalist and also a fairy fantasy. If in those lines we find in Scott a genius for exquisite and translucent verbal coloring, corresponding to the art of Constable or Corot in imaginative vision or fantasy, we discover the romantic pigmentation of Rossetti (as a painter) and the rich luminous impressionism of Monet, in the lines following the final apostrophe to Beauty in Scott’s noble Ode for the Keats’ Centenary:—

It is not necessary to illustrate the variety of Scott’s pigmentation. That is as remarkable as its luminous beauty. What is most compelling in his Nature-painting is the unique ingenuity, power, and romantic beauty of his color phrases, metaphors, and similes. The naturalistic and imaginative intensity of them is a poetic phenomenon by itself. Consider these phrases: ‘Sun, like a gold sword,’ ‘A blade of gladiolus, like a sword,’ ‘A burning pool of scent and heat,’ ‘Within the windless deeps of memory,’ ‘Bent like a shield between the silver seas,’ ‘With gulfs of blue and summits of rosy snow.’ Consider also these lines:—

and, finally, consider the compelling romantic fantasy of color and simile in this stanza from The Piper of Arll:—

It was said that there is more of Canada in the poetry of Duncan Campbell Scott than in the verse of any other Canadian poet. So far this appears to be true of Scott’s painting of Nature in Canada. Scott, it must be observed, is a Nature painter, never a Nature interpreter, as were Lampman and Carman. Yet there is in Scott’s poetry a decided interpretative or philosophical element. It is on the side of his philosophical poetry that Scott’s verse contains more of the Canadian spirit than does the verse of any other Canadian poet. As a philosophical poet Scott is, first, an interpreter of humanity and life in Canada—and his interpretations possess highly novel distinction and spiritual import. His philosophical poetry is contained in three volumes, Labor and the Angel (1898), New World Lyrics and Ballads (1905), and Via Borealis (1906).

In his New World Lyrics and Ballads, Scott aims to reveal the kind of mind or thought which the strange humanity of the Northwest in Canada—the Indian heart in the wild North of Canada—contains. In the volume Indian themes predominate, and the so called Ballads are more aptly named Legends, because Scott’s Ballads are art and the product of a reflective mind thinking into Indian mind the thoughts of a civilized man, whereas the genuine Ballad is a spontaneous story told in simple verse. Moreover, Scott’s genius is lyrical; but in these so called Ballads he attempts dramatic situation and emotion. It all lands him in recondite psychological symbolism, as, for instance, in The Mission of the Trees or in The Forsaken, which is later attempted in The Half-Breed Girl (from Via Borealis), a striking essay in Indian introspection. What we get from these poems is Scott’s perception and revealment of spiritual Beauty in loneliness—his half-mystical intuition that the spirit in civilized man, in the Indian soul, and in Nature everywhere is one and the same spirit, and that civilization has only resulted in veiling the face of God and in separating his creatures from one another and from the Creator.

This vague mystical intuition of the mystery and yet identity of spirit in man and Nature is beautifully, perhaps too sensuously, envisaged in Scott’s Spring on Mattagami (from Via Borealis). This poem is seductively musical and highly impressionistic, but shows the influence of Meredith (Love in a Wilderness) in its interpretation of the conflict of Love and Law in the universe. What counts and solaces, however, is the Vision or Light of a higher Love and a deeper Law that lie behind the seemingly meaningless conflict of the visible love and law. After all, the poet, like the rest of mortals, can only ‘trust’ in the supremacy of Good in the universe:—

This abstract mystical symbolism is Old World, not Canadian, not Scott’s own philosophy of the spirit for the Canadian spirit. His own is found in his poem Labor and the Angel. It is original and noble in conception; and, consistently with its serious didactic purpose and ideas, or symbolism, its diction is vernacular, its form and rhythm are suited to plain narrative; and the whole is devoid of Scott’s luxuriant color and sensuous melody. It is a dramatic poem in the sense that it is designed to affect the heart and the imagination with dramatic force and truth. As a criticism of life in the Arnoldian sense, we see in the poem the influence of Matthew Arnold. But its thought and style show more notably the influence of Browning and Meredith, especially in its syntactical ellipses, bald and abrupt lines.

In its way, Labor and the Angel is as finely and as impressively achieved as Tennyson’s Princess. It answers a question which is particularly pertinent to Canada where work—the gaining of material subsistence—necessarily is paramount, because inevitable and pressing. As with Browning, so with Scott, Woman is man’s life-star and inspiration. In the poem Labor and the Angel, the Man and the Girl are common humanity, but the Girl, who is also the Angel of Labor, is the man’s companion and helpmate:—

Labor, the kind which is mere toil and drudgery, is without meaning and unspiritual. But Woman was designed by God as the power which shall inspire men to spirituality in all things. As Man, every man would be ‘blind’ and purposeless and futile. But as Man, companioned and inspired by Woman and idealizing labor for the end of her companionship and love and the spiritual fruits of that love, every man, who is obedient to the ideal, transmutes the lowliest labor into spiritual purpose, meaning and result:—

Man and Labor, Woman and Love as the star and inspiration of man in all his work—what nobler dignity could any poet give to Woman, and what other consolation of philosophy could he conceive and sing that would, as it does, for men more surely

Labor and the Angel is unique amongst poems by Canadians, and its noble philosophy of the spirit challenges poems of similar quality by Tennyson, Browning, Meredith, and Emerson.

Duncan Campbell Scott—austere intellectualist, superb verbal musician, luminous Nature-painter, and impeccable technical virtuoso of verse amongst Canadian poets—it is by him that we are also given in The Height of Land the finest expression of the true spiritual mysticism, the immediate perception of God—an intuition in which Life appears

Seek we in the poetry of Duncan Campbell Scott for the choice and ineluctable goods of the spirit,—music, color, high thought and serene philosophy—and we shall always be rewarded with Beauty ‘golden and inappellable.’

The quotations in this chapter are chiefly from Beauty and Life, by Duncan Campbell Scott, (McClelland & Stewart).

Wilfred Campbell

In the early nineties of the last century three young Canadian poets, who were employed in the Civil Service Departments at Ottawa, were closely associated in a systematic way as men of letters. They were Wilfred Campbell, Archibald Lampman, and Duncan Campbell Scott. In the Toronto Globe they conducted a department of literary criticism and ‘causerie’ under the caption ‘The Mermaid Inn.’ Oddly, these three young Canadian men of letters were singularly dissimilar in poetic temperament, attitudes, vision, and ideals. As a poet Lampman was an interpreter of the inner meaning of the beauty and moods of Nature. He and Nature communed with each other by reciprocal sympathy, and he cared greatly for style and craftsmanship in poetry. Duncan Campbell Scott loved beauty for its own sake as a spiritual delight or source of ecstasy, but perfection of form, style, artistry—‘art for art’s sake’—pre-empted all other considerations in poetry. Wilfred Campbell occupied a middle ground. He was an objective Nature-painter, with tendencies to be more interested in Nature as a habitat or background of the human spirit which had come from God and was going to God. He was solicitous about form and imagery, color and melody in poetry, but for him these were always a means to an end, never a mere end in themselves. Or, harking back to influences, we may say that Lampman wrote poetry with the eye and the spirit of Keats and Wordsworth; Scott with the eye of Matthew Arnold for naturalistic and moral beauty and chaste artistry; and Campbell in the spirit of Longfellow and Emerson, and, sometimes, of Tennyson.

With Campbell it was the substance or matter,—the ideas, thought, and meanings for the spirit—not the formal elements or manner of poetry, that counted for most. It is the substance of poetry, its meanings for the spirit, that counts always for most with the people. For this reason, though Campbell is not the greatest of the poets of the first Systematic School, he is, and will remain, as he has been called, ‘the poet of the people’s choice.’

A distinct evolution—and advance in vision—from objective nature-painting of the spirit can be observed in the successive volumes of Campbell’s verse. Naturally, until he had reflected on his aims as a poet, he did not announce his poetic creed in his first volume of verse. He did this in his fourth volume, Collected Poems (1905) in his poem Higher Kinship:—

‘Not of the senses’—Campbell is not a lover of impressionism for its own sake, but he loves the simple, colorful aspects of Nature for the joy, comfort and peace which they give to ‘the inward soul.’ He has his equals as an impressionistic colorist, but he is supreme when he paints a phenomenon or aspect of Nature in monotone or in subdued tones as in pastel, or when he etches a scene with a Whistler-like feeling for atmosphere, shadow, and chiaroscuro, and for line. In 1888, when he was in his twenty-seventh year, Campbell published a booklet of twenty lyrics, Snowflakes and Sunbeams. In these first lyrics he disclosed the eye of monotonist and etcher for the beauty of Nature. The verse in this rare little volume is marked, too, by a grace and melody which enhance the pictures. What but a ‘symphony in white’ is his Snow—

Thus, through several stanzas, he paints Nature in white, seemingly for the joy of the senses but really for ‘the inward soul.’ For a moment he obtrudes the ‘message’ which the snow conveys to the moral imagination—

Beautiful as an original image is the thought of the snow descending hushed and holy, ‘like the great pity of God in his love,’ but it is a sentimental obtrusion, out of character with the snow-picture as such. We find Campbell frequently creating the most engaging Nature pictures, and here or there in a poem recalling the eye from the pure visual delights to let the moral imagination reflect on some suggestion, some similitude, for ‘the inward soul.’ What a pretty pastel, for instance, he paints with spare use of mere tints, in the first two stanzas of In the Study:—

But Campbell does not continue the strict painting of the objective picture. He introduces something ‘for the inward soul,’ as he does, in the concluding stanza:—

This is not a fault in Campbell’s poetry. It is an essential part of his art. As in Longfellow, so in Campbell the humanized substance of his verse is consciously designed for the popular heart, and ensures popular acceptance. Campbell would rather do this than to write always for art’s sake, as in these sheer pictorial stanzas from A Winter’s Night:—

Yet, he can employ delineative line with swift and sure artistry just to make a picture for its own sake, disclosing absolute mastery in economy of means, as in his Rododactulos:—

That is an exquisite bit of naturalistic etching with a poetic meaning intrinsically in the picture of the Maiden Morn standing and dreaming in the mist. The picture itself delights both the visual faculty and the imagination. Campbell also possessed the faculty of painting vividly, as with a single sweep of the brush, as in his Lake Huron (in October) and its memorable lines:—

and these still more vivid lines:—

Campbell did not aim or strive to be a word-virtuoso. But what he could achieve as an artist was to make at will a dainty or a glorious picture, and so localize the picture that one can immediately tell which section of the Canadian land or waters is delineated. He surpassed all his contemporaries in the gift of ‘flashing’ a vivid picture in a single line, as, for instance:—

or this tremendous line:—

The last line quoted also discloses in Campbell a power which is not in any other Canadian poet—the Miltonic power of conveying by description ideated sensations of unending space and movement. Matching almost any piece of sheer description of immensity by Milton is Campbell’s compelling panorama of Lazarus in his flight from Heaven to Hell and the sensations of illimitable depths downward that it creates in the reader, as in these stanzas from his poem Lazarus:—

Campbell had a gift, too, for vivid color epithets and for vowel and alliterative word-melody. Indeed he was a master of color and verbal melody. Some of his more original and striking alliterative lines are:—

None of Campbell’s contemporaries surpassed him in painting a simple but vivid genre picture, and enhancing it with verbal melody, as he does, for instance, in his Canadian Folksong, beginning:—

As a poet of humane patriotism, which has regard for international or world relations, and which is not mere ‘drum and trumpet’ patriotism, Campbell stands in a class by himself. He had a Keltic love of place or home. It was a passion with him, but the passion embraced the Anglo-Saxon peoples. So that his patriotic poetry contains a large element of the ideal of Anglo-Saxon unity and of the imperialistic destiny of the British peoples. Thus we find him singing with equal warmth of Scotland, the homeland of his ancestors (as in The World-Mother), of England (as in his To England), of the United States (as in his To the United States), and of Canada, his homeland (as in Canada.)

A sincere and profound sense and love of brotherhood is the key-note of his patriotic poetry. There is no magniloquent bombast in it, whereas it must be admitted that Roberts’ Canada and his Ode to the Confederacy have at least an air of pomp of words which sound like mere magniloquence or bombast. But there is in Campbell’s Canada a sincere sense of history, of historical background and heroic origins, as well as of a people whom the vastness of their habitat should impel to a great and noble destiny. Besides, Campbell sings of the homeland in simple octameter couplets, the very simplicity of which impresses the spirit with a deep sense of truth and reality. The poem, with a slight change or two for choral singing would, if set to dignified and sonorous music, be fitted to be an inspiring and inspiriting National Hymn. It is a colorful, lyrical poem, a Song, suffused with the qualities of the Canadian spirit and the beauties of the Canadian habitat. We quote a few excerpts:—

Wilfred Campbell, then, appears as a lyrist of Nature and poet of the Spirit, who is an adroit and vivid objective colorist and etcher, but who, for the most part, tinges his lyricism of Nature with meanings for the ‘inward soul.’ With equal dexterity and truth he painted an impressionistic or a genre picture. But in doing this, he was unexcelled by his contemporaries in Canada in economy of means for expression. While, however, he was thus given to painting or delineating Nature in Canada, he also appears as a poet who ‘hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality.’ He gave proof of this in a singular way. Whatever other distinctions belong to him, Campbell has never been equalled, by another Canadian poet, in the Dramatic Monologue. Perhaps, in view of the special meaning which Browning has given to this species of poetry, it were better to use the formula Dramatic Monody. For this phrase better describes Campbell’s poignant, compelling Unabsolved, The Mother, and Lazarus. But however categorized, these poems reveal the fact that Campbell’s genius was essentially dramatic. This dramatic instinct in him, Campbell developed to a high degree until he essayed the five-act poetic drama. It is as a Poetic Dramatist that Campbell achieved a distinct and fixed place in Canadian creative poetry.

The first poet to attempt nativistic or native poetic drama in Canada was Charles Mair, who published at Toronto, in 1886. Tecumseh: A Drama. Many of its characters are Canadian and much of its setting and color are Canadian. Mair had created a work of real interest, of excellent structure and dramatic development, and had used impressively Canadian properties, character, and environment. The verse is genuinely artistic and colorful and dramatic, and the poem as a whole is worthy of critical consideration; but only as the first example of Canadian native poetic drama is Tecumseh to be regarded as significant in the literary history of Canada.

Much superior to the dramatic poetry of Mair is that of Wilfred Campbell. It is considerable in quantity, comprising the following (as he called them) ‘poetical tragedies and dramas:’ Mordred, Hildebrand, The Brockenfiend, Robespierre, Daulac, Morning, Sanio, and The Admiral’s Daughter. The quality of his poetical tragedies and dramas distinguishes him as the first really important creator of poetic drama in Canada.

The titles of his poetic tragedies and dramas clearly indicate that, with one exception, his subjects were derivative and his treatment traditional. With the exception of his Daulac he took his subjects from Arthurian legend and European romantic history. He was considerably under the influence of Tennyson. Though he gave us an interesting and arresting poetic drama with his Daulac, it is specially notable as a drama which is Canadian in subject, character, and setting. He was not so successful with it as with his poetic drama based on Arthurian legend and romantic history. The reason is that in a large degree he possessed an ‘Old World,’ a Keltic imagination, and his imagination was deeply impressed and moved by the romance of mediaeval heroic exploits:—

The heroism of Daulac, his combats and other heroic exploits were so near in time to the age of Campbell himself that they could not affect the poet’s imagination so pervasively and compellingly as do the older mediaeval romances of heroic exploits. Campbell did not feel the Daulac story as he had felt the Arthurian or romantic legends of Europe. He, therefore, did not, because he could not, put into his Daulac the same power of imagination and dramatic characterization and reality that he put into his other dramas. But Daulac, notwithstanding, is a noble poetic drama; and since it is Canadian through and through, in subject, in setting, and in authorship, we may estimate it as the first native poetic drama of genuine art and power in the creative literature of Canada.

The quotations from Wilfred Campbell’s work in this chapter are from The Poetical Works of Wilfred Campbell (Hodder & Stoughton, Limited: Toronto).

Pauline Johnson

The name, life, and poetry of Pauline Johnson affect the heart and imagination with the arresting pathos which attaches to the imperishable memory of a belated and beautiful spirit who came singing new and winning music of earth, and man, and love. She was the most elementally human of all Canadian poets. In some respects Pauline Johnson was the most original and engaging singer in the company of the Canadian lyrists who were born in 1860, 1861, and 1862—Roberts, Carman, Lampman, Campbell, and Duncan Campbell Scott.

Pauline Johnson’s grandfather, who attained special glory for his valorous deed of setting fire, with his own hands, to the city of Buffalo in the War of 1812, was distinguished, in times of peace, by his tribesmen with the honorable and poetic sobriquet, ‘The Mohawk Warbler,’ not because he could actually ‘warble’ like a present-day lyric tenor, but because he possessed a ready flow of language which he used with impassioned and dramatic eloquence. The old warrior’s granddaughter, in her ballads and poems of Indian wrongs and Indian heroic deeds, wrote with the same dramatic intensity and the same gift for dramatic picture; and in her songs of Nature and of love sang with a lyrical lilt as natural, musical, free, and passionate as the warblings of the thrush or lark or linnet.

The distinctive qualities of Pauline Johnson’s genius and poetry are here noted summarily. In general: As a story-telling balladist she must be ranked with the best Canadian poets who have essayed the same genre, though in some of her ballads there are lines which are rhetorical and melodramatic. On the whole, however, her story-telling ballads are unsurpassed by her Canadian confrères, in emotional intensity, rapid movement, terse phrasing, and dramatic pictorial vividness.

As a verbal musician, and as a nature-painter and etcher, Pauline Johnson again must be given a very high place. Some of her poems are marked by absolutely avian abandon; others by haunting melody; and others by sweetly flowing rhythm and winning cadences, and by sensuous vowel-harmonies and faultless rhymes. Many of her poems disclose the gift to paint in words a picture from Nature with the impressionist’s mastery of sensation and color. Some of them are low-keyed and full of shadows, suggested sensations, and mystery. Others are dainty word-etchings, picturesquely or subtly drawn and subdued in tone.

In particular: Pauline Johnson has yet, by other Canadian poets, to be equalled as a lyrist of the passion and pathos of romantic love, and as an inventor of picturesque, veracious, vivid, beautiful, and compelling poetic figures and images. Her love poems are full of the most poignant passion and pathos. It would be easy to make a catalogue of a half hundred or more poetic figures and images which are unique in descriptive aptness or in emotional ‘tang.’

In short, the supreme spiritual and aesthetic qualities of Pauline Johnson’s poetry are its real sincerity, its naiveté of thought, its simplicity of structure, its lovely color images, its winning music, its passion, pathos, and womanly tenderness. But first place must be given to its dulcet and insinuating music and to its original and arresting poetic figures and images.

Pauline Johnson, taking the date engraved on the monument to her memory at Vancouver, was born in 1861. She died at Vancouver in 1912. She was the youngest child of a family of four born to the late G. H. M. Johnson (Onwononsyshon) of Brantford, Ontario, Head Chief of the Six Nations Indians, and his wife, Emily S. Howells, who was of English parentage and born at Brixton, England. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) was born on her father’s estate, which is on the Reserve apportioned the Mohawk Tribe by the Canadian government. It must, therefore, pique the imagination to know that Pauline Johnson was of pure Indian and pure English descent, but that though she travelled from coast to coast in Canada and the United States and twice to England, her freedom of movement was ‘privileged’ and she was always, wherever she went, a ‘ward’ of the Canadian government.

In Pauline Johnson’s case there are nice, though not recondite, problems in literary psychology and interpretive criticism. For instance: Was Pauline Johnson’s genius Indian, or English? Was it inherited, or was she a ‘born’ poet, or how else may her gifts and tastes be explained? The poet herself always insisted, with considerable pride, on her Indian origin. Some critics, reasoning by quasi-inductions, abetted her in this belief. Yet, so far as her genius is concerned, the only one of her Indian ancestors who had anything like literary gifts was her grandfather, ‘The Mohawk Warbler,’ and his gifts were those of the ‘tongue’ in compelling eloquence rather than aesthetic sensibility and the power of expressing in words the beauty and the music in Nature. On the other hand, Pauline Johnson’s English ancestors were a family who possessed distinct literary tendencies and habits. The most distinguished member of the branches of that family was W. D. Howells, the American novelist, poet, and essayist. It is most probable that she inherited her literary gifts from her English ancestors. For in Flint and Feather—her complete poems—there is not one concept, or bit of color, or rhythm, or anything else, that may be described as specifically Indian. Rather it is all British or Universal. We do find in her poems Indian themes, protests against British ruthlessness in governmental treatment of the Indian, and the celebration of Indian valor and love. But these are human utterances. Moreover, of the ninety poems in Flint and Feather, only eight concern the Indian, and these only on the side of episodes which formed good material for romantic story-telling in verse. In these fine ballads Pauline Johnson became indeed the ‘Voice’ of her inarticulate Indian fellows, but the voice itself was that of a woman cultured in the forms and music of English poetry. Pauline Johnson’s loyalty to the Indian side of her ancestry, and her pride in it, were admirable; but, if heredity is to be accepted as a real cause of genius, her taste for literature, and her bent towards literary expression, must have come from her mother’s side. For her mother was both a cultured and a romantically-minded woman. If, however, we are to grant the poet any gift from her Indian ancestry, we must remember her brilliant career as a reciter or dramatic reader. If she inherited this dramatic gift, then she got it from her eloquent grandfather, ‘The Mohawk Warbler.’ Though she used it conspicuously in her dramatic readings, the gift is also observable in the vividly graphic qualities, and in the emotional intensity, of her story-telling ballads.

Pauline Johnson was the first genuinely Canadian ‘daughter of the soil’ who indubitably was born a poet; and her poetic development was one not in artistic craftsmanship, but in vision. The first important fact in her spiritual history is that at a very early age the future poet evinced an original and intense taste for verse, expressing this taste both by a fondness for memorizing verses read to her and for composing childish jingles about familiar domestic objects. A pretty illustration of Pauline Johnson’s early predilection for poetry is furnished in the Biographical Sketch to Flint and Feather, in which it is related that when she was but four years old (1865) she was asked by a friend who was going to a distant city what he should bring her as a gift, and that the child-poet replied, ‘Verses, please!’

The second important fact in Pauline Johnson’s spiritual history is that from the time she could pen words intelligently up to the close of her public-school days she devoted much of her leisure to self-cultivation in the appreciation and the writing of verse. Before she was twelve years old (1873), Pauline Johnson had thoroughly read Shakespeare and the British romantic poets, Scott and Byron, and with their texts cultivated her native sense of poetic diction and imagery, of verbal rhythm and music (vowel-harmony, rhyme, consonance, assonance, alliteration), and of color-epithets for brilliant and subtly impressionistic word-painting.

Pauline Johnson, with rare good sense, did not publish any of her verses till considerable time after she had completed her formal schooling and her personally conducted studies of versification, verbal music, and poetic imagery. But as soon as she began to offer her verses to editors, she seems to have found ready acceptances. The first periodical to welcome her verse was a small New York magazine, Gems of Poetry, published, presumably, in the early ’80’s of the last century. This, however, can not be regarded as a significant event. Really significant was the fact that The Week (founded by Goldwin Smith) was the first Canadian magazine to publish her verse. This fact assured her the recognition and sponsorship of Goldwin Smith, himself an eminent man-of-letters and a poet, and also, possibly, of Charles G. D. Roberts, who was literary editor of The Week in 1883-1884, and who was the first editor to stand sponsor for Archibald Lampman. The imprimatur of The Week, or the sponsorship of Goldwin Smith and Roberts, automatically elected Pauline Johnson to the company of the Systematic Group of Canadian poets born in 1860, 1861 and 1862, and introduced her to the English-speaking world as a new and authentically gifted singer, in whose music, though formally composed in the English manner of versification, would, in due time, be heard the hitherto unheard melancholy over-tones and wildwood notes of the aboriginal Canadian spirit.

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:—