The Moccasin Maker | Page 2

autobiographical in its
nature; here is the story of her mother's life told with rare graciousness
and affection, in language which is never without eloquence; and even
when the dialogue makes you feel that the real characters never talked
as they do in this monograph, it is still unstilted and somehow really
convincing. Touching to a degree is the first chapter, "My Mother," and
it, with all the rest of the book, makes one feel that Canadian literature
would have been poorer, that something would have been missed from
this story of Indian life if this volume had not been written. It is no
argument against the book that Pauline Johnson had not learnt the art of
short-story writing; she was a poetess, not a writer of fiction; but the

incidents described in many of these chapters show that, had she
chosen to write fiction instead of verse, and had begun at an early stage
in her career to do so, she would have succeeded. Her style is always
picturesque, she has a good sense of the salient incident that makes a
story, she could give to it the touch of drama, and she is always
interesting, even when there is discursiveness, occasional weakness,
and when the picture is not well pulled together. The book had to be
written; she knew it, and she did it. The book will be read, not for
patriotic reasons, not from admiration of work achieved by one of the
Indian race; but because it is intrinsically human, interesting and often
compelling in narrative and event.
May it be permitted to add one word of personal comment? I never saw
Pauline Johnson in her own land, at her own hearthstone, but only in
my house in London and at other houses in London, where she brought
a breath of the wild; not because she dressed in Indian costume, but
because its atmosphere was round her. The feeling of the wild looked
out of her eyes, stirred in her gesture, moved in her footstep. I am glad
to have known this rare creature who had the courage to be glad of her
origin, without defiance, but with an unchanging, if unspoken,
insistence. Her native land and the Empire should be glad of her for
what she was and for what she stood; her native land and the Empire
should be glad of her for the work, interesting, vivid and human, which
she has done. It will preserve her memory. In an age growing sordid
such fresh spirits as she should be welcomed for what they are, for
what they do. This book by Pauline Johnson should be welcomed for
what she was and for what it is.
Gilbert Parker.

PAULINE JOHNSON: AN APPRECIATION.
By Charles Mair.
The writer, having contributed a brief "Appreciation" of the late Miss E.
Pauline Johnson to the July number of The Canadian Magazine, has

been asked by the editor of this collection of her hitherto unpublished
writings to allow it to be used as a Preface, with such additions or
omissions as might seem desirable. He has not yet seen any portion of
the book, but quite apart from its merits it is eagerly looked for by Miss
Johnson's many friends and admirers as a final memorial of her literary
life. It will now be read with an added interest, begot of her painfully
sad and untimely end.
In the death of Miss Johnson a poet passed away of undoubted genius;
one who wrote with passion, but without extravagance, and upon
themes foreign, perhaps, to some of her readers, but, to herself, familiar
as the air she breathed.
When her racial poetry first appeared, its effect upon the reader was as
that of something abnormal, something new and strange, and certainly
unexampled in Canadian verse. For here was a girl whose blood and
sympathies were largely drawn from the greatest tribe of the most
advanced nation of Indians on the continent, who spoke out, "loud and
bold," not for it alone, but for the whole red race, and sang of its glories
and its wrongs in strains of poetic fire.
However aloof the sympathies of the ordinary business world may be
from the red man's record, even it is moved at times by his fate, and
stirred by his persistent, his inevitable romance. For the Indian's record
is the background, and not seldom the foreground, of American history,
in which his endless contests with the invader were but a counterpart of
the unwritten, or recorded, struggles of all primitive time.
In that long strife the bitterest charge against him is his barbarity,
which, if all that is alleged is to be believed--and much of it is
authentic--constitutes in the annals of pioneer settlement and
aggression a chapter of horrors.
But equally vindictive