4. Longfellow’s Hiawatha, Carroll’s Hiawatha
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, THE SONG OF HIAWATHA / LEWIS CARROLL, “HIAWATHA’S PHOTOGRAPHING”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the great literary man of his day. Modest, widely if not wisely adored (the poets loved by one generation are most at risk when the next scorns its elders), he was visited by the small and great (from neighborhood children to the emperor of Brazil), burdened with honors (receiving a chair carved from the remains of the famous spreading chestnut-tree), and made an object of public sympathy when his second wife died in an accidental fire. Longfellow was so well known that his birthday was marked in public schools, and after his death his face pasted on a brand of cigars. Admirers built replicas of his Cambridge house in Detroit, Minneapolis, Great Barrington, and Evanston—late into the 1920s, Sears, Roebuck still sold plans for a version of the house. Though it had been Washington’s headquarters during the siege of Boston, Craigie House was ever after remembered as the home of Longfellow.
Yet the chill of the future was felt as early as 1856, when a London reviewer asked of Whitman, “Is this man with the ‘barbaric yawp’ to push Longfellow into the shade, and he meanwhile to stand and ‘make mouths’ at the sun? The chance of this might be formidable were it not ridiculous.”1 The fatal question had been posed. By 1868, a reviewer for Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art could tout Whitman as the “first characteristic poetical writer that the United States have produced. Longfellow is but Tennyson and water.”2
When we think of Longfellow now, he seems little better than a city-bred Whittier, a Norman Rockwell avant la lettre, always ready to take some homebound scene, lay on a few schmaltzy touches, and varnish it up. Where Frost is weak, he sounds most like Longfellow (the ending of “ ‘Out, Out—’ ” does not quite salvage the poem from Longfellowish melodrama).3 It’s fortunate that Frost only occasionally falls victim to the tear-stained side of Yankee wisdom, and unfortunate that he’s often represented in anthologies by just those poems where he succumbs.
Longfellow was the poet of the age, so long as it was the age. Yet no man can be all good who writes little but sentimental tosh:
I hear in the chamber above me
The patter of little feet,
The sound of a door that is opened,
And voices soft and sweet.
From my study I see in the lamplight,
Descending the broad hall stair,
Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra,
And Edith with golden hair.4
Longfellow excelled at slick-tongued bathos that embodied the sentimental impulses of popular journalism—but his audience was surprisingly broad. Presented to Queen Victoria in 1869, he made a self-deprecating remark about his fame. Her majesty replied, “Oh, I assure you, Mr. Longfellow, you are very well known. All my servants read you.”5
However revered he was below stairs at Windsor Castle, there were readers of more captious temper. The characteristics that once made Longfellow cherished make him look fatuous now, but they already looked fatuous to those who parodied him with malicious glee. (It’s a mistake to condemn a time for its best sellers or think it redeemed by its iconoclasts—yet both reveal something of the age.)
Take Longfellow’s solemn bucket of maple sap, “A Psalm of Life”:
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!—
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.6
Longfellow had many parodists, good, bad, and indifferent; but only a malevolent genius could have turned this into a poem about life insurance:
Tell me not in mournful numbers,
Life Assurance is a dream,
And that while the public slumbers,
Figures are not what they seem!7
When parody applies the outer shell to a subject wholly unsuitable to the gravitas of the model, it turns topsy-turvy every verity the original holds sacred. Longfellow’s booming pieties about the living who think only of the afterlife are honorable enough. He wanted people to live in this world, while they lived. Life insurance is the bet the living make against death, the bet the bettor can’t live to see paid off—the parody suggests that once the insured is dead he’ll be cheated. (Religion has often been thought to be a similar gamble—hence Pascal’s wager.) One may agree with the poet’s sentiments but not with his sentiment.
In Longfellow, far too many ideas come with an improving lecture attached—though you may applaud the idea, it’s hard to stand the lecture. The rhetorical bullying, righteous as a holiday Christian’s, is almost worse than the theological bullying it abhors. It took another parodist to sense that such breast- and brow-beating were little better than advertising:
Tell me not in doleful murmurs
Ink is but a mouldy stream!
And the pen it rusts, and murders
Writing paper by the ream!
Thatcher’s Ink is Ink in earnest!
And to rust is not its goal;
Mud thou art, to mould returnest,
Was not spoken as its dole.8
Turning Adamic dust to mud is an exquisite touch. Here, here too, the reversals work more deeply because the subjects have unlikely alliances. Ink seems to promise a life in words everlasting—as do poems, for that matter. Much though Longfellow ballyhooed the engaged life, he was writing at one remove from life. That might be too subtle a reading of the parody, but even parody may be wiser than it knows. The poet who could thunder, “Art is long, and Time is fleeting, / And our hearts, though stout and brave, / Still, like muffled drums, are beating / Funeral marches to the grave,”9 is stripped and shown up as a handwringing ninny by the parodist who answers, in antiphonal chorus, “Blots begone! Vile ink be fleeting! / Penman, be no more a slave! / Let all other inks go beating / Funeral marches to their grave!”10
It’s not clear if Thatcher’s Ink could be found at the local stationer’s (one T. Thatcher was the author of the parody). A. E. Housman, however, while still a student at Oxford, pursued an attack similarly commercial against this most commerce-minded of poets, interpolating lines into Longfellow’s “Excelsior”—the odd lines are Longfellow, almost exactly, and the even, Housman:
The shades of night were falling fast,
And the rain was falling faster,
When through an Alpine village passed
An Alpine village pastor:
A youth who bore mid snow and ice
A bird that wouldn’t chirrup,
And a banner with the strange device—
“Mrs. Winslow’s soothing syrup.”11
The knockabout comedy continues for another two stanzas, as devastating to Longfellow’s Horatio Alger–ish moral boosterism as Lewis Carroll’s “The White Knight’s Song” was to Wordsworth’s. Housman may not have known that the active ingredient in Mrs. Winslow’s syrup was morphine—the syrup was implicated in the deaths of numerous babies.12
The art of parody lies, not just in imitating the meter and rhyme scheme (slipping into the form as if it were a set of old clothes), but in reframing the subject to make it ludicrous, meanwhile adopting the form with such style that the original seems almost the imitation. Parody finds a fracture in behavior—its caricatures exploit what is usually an innocent violation of good manners (bragging, pomposity, Wordsworth-itis). Often parody is the vengeance of experience upon innocence, the knowing upon the unknowing, the literati upon the middlebrow—at least, when it is not the reverse. Parody is one of the democratic arts—it pulls down the man on the pedestal and raises the man from the gutter, unless it parodies him, too. Longfellow, whatever his highbrow appetites, exemplified the solid middle-class values of the village banker—hard work, responsibility, yearning for hearth and home, and a good old-fashioned physic of American mawkishness.
Even Longfellow’s most beloved poems were not immune. Indeed, what made them beloved made them readier targets, not least because a certain homely fatheadedness is always a painted bull’s-eye for the cynic. Many schoolchildren of a certain age still recall with horror having to memorize “The Village Blacksmith”:
Under a spreading chestnut-tree
The village smithy stands;
The smith, a mighty man is he,
With large and sinewy hands;
And the muscles of his brawny arms
Are strong as iron bands.
His hair is crisp, and black, and long,
His face is like the tan;
His brow is wet with honest sweat,
He earns whate’er he can,
And looks the whole world in the face,
For he owes not any man.13
This ode to four-square Yankee independence is so drenched in the sweat of nostalgia, it’s hard to understand why the poet wasn’t laughed off the shelves. In his review of Ballads and Other Poems (1841), Poe praised the poem as “nearly true,” having remarked that Longfellow’s verse would “find stern defenders … so long as the world is full to overflowing with cant and conventicles.”14
Poe had some years before accused Longfellow of plagiarism (this was like the hammer calling the anvil black), though the New England poet was guilty of little worse than pilfering ideas, after the manner of the day.15 Still, the curious thing about Longfellow is that, even if you’ve never read the poems, when you come to them you’re sure you’ve read them before. He had a gift for swallowing literature whole and producing something insufferably commonplace—Homer and Dante and Milton went in, and out came sausage. There’s hardly a cliché that Longfellow could refuse when offered, and hardly one he wouldn’t otherwise drag in by brute force. It’s not surprising that such a poem would be answered, some decades later, by “The Village Schoolboy”:
Under the garden apple-tree
The village schoolboy stands;
The boy, a nasty boy is he,
With muddy, filthy hands;
And the mussel-shells he’s playing with
Are pick’d from dirty sands.
His hair is short, and red, and straight,
His face is like the tar;
He cries and bawls when mother calls,
You hear him near and far,
And when he gets a chance he steals
The sugar from the jar.16
You wonder if by “dirty” the parodist meant “fouled with sewage”—not an impossible thought even late in the century. That would make the boy’s hand in the sugar jar more piquant.
When you think of Whitman’s poems, you think of what they include; when you think of Longfellow’s, you think of what they leave out—here are the things about a village that Longfellow left out. (Parody is always a form of criticism, often with a cheerful show of moral turpitude attached.) With his plummy sentiments and naive portraits of village contentment, Longfellow makes Edgar Lee Masters look like a barn-burner. It’s tempting to see the mayhem with which “The Village Schoolboy” ends, not as the echo of the ringing blows of the blacksmith, but as the projection of the reader’s temptation to go after the poet with brickbat and cudgel: “His father smacks him in the face, / He pulls him by the nose, / The village schoolboy only cries, / And crying—off he goes.”17
Longfellow was part of the great age of American reinvention, when poets born a few decades after the Revolution—and still paying their debts to whatever was being written in London (it was not until Whitman that things began to change)—created a faux America of honest mechanics and kindly shopholders, homespun virtues and genteel manners, an America that would not scare away a dollar of foreign trade. Unfortunately this pretty picture was marred by the travel memoirs published whenever an Englishman happened to visit the place, most notoriously Dickens’s American Notes for General Circulation (1842), whose very title raised suspicion about American currency, and Mrs. Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832). Frances Trollope, the novelist’s mother, had opened a department store in Cincinnati—when it proved an abject failure, she was witty in her vengeance. The remaking of America included rewriting the past in romantic and heroic terms. “Paul Revere’s Ride” (1860), a late example but one of the most famous poems of the day, was Longfellow’s excuse for nonsense history, hardly forgivable even as a call to arms on the eve of a more disastrous war. The painting Washington Crossing the Delaware (1850) was among the contributions by other arts to this indulgence in romantic drama over history—Emanuel Leutze’s portrayal might have been accurate if not for the flag, the boat, the ice, the weather, and the time of day.18
Heroic poems were America’s earliest theme park—though, if Longfellow is bad, there are poets far worse, poets who did nothing but produce pulp sentiment. Alas, even his set pieces, like “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport,” are disfigured by deadening adjectives, bloated rhetoric (the “groaning earth in travail and in pain”), a sweet tooth for histrionic metaphor (“they keep / The long, mysterious Exodus of Death”), and the occasional accidental comedy (the dead lie “Silent beside the never-silent waves, / At rest in all this moving up and down!”).19 Longfellow’s heart is often in the right place (not always just pinned to his sleeve), but his airy rectitude is difficult to take. He lets any breath of fancy overwhelm the facts—the Jews whose graves so puzzled him were merely Sephardic Jews, remnants in Newport of the diaspora from Spain and Portugal. Their presence was no stranger than that of the Portuguese fishermen who lived in many coastal New England villages.
Most members of the American Renaissance were more steely-eyed (Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau—and Melville everywhere except in his poems). Parody provided rude contrast to Longfellow’s samplers and needlepoint—the parodist was not afraid to write of the village blacksmith as he likely was:
Under the spreading chestnut tree
The village blacksmith stands,
The smith an awful cad is he
With very dirty hands.
For keepers and the rural police
He doesn’t care a hang.
He swears, and fights, and whops his wife,
Gets drunk whene’er he can;
In point of fact, our village smith’s
A very awful man.20
This anonymous piece dates to 1873, yet it sounds like a lost work by W. S. Gilbert. Indeed, there’s a curious echo in King Gama’s song, “If You Give Me Your Attention,” from Princess Ida (1884): “I love my fellow creatures—I do all the good I can— / Yet everybody says I’m such a disagreeable man!”21 The growls of the parody (Longfellow could incite other poets almost to violence) would sound light and jaunty set to Sullivan’s music—Gilbert’s fourteeners are just Longfellow’s ballad measure without the line break. The sentimentality of the original would have turned burlesque in such a melody, for Longfellow’s most damaging parodist was himself.
The British were not above using Longfellow to sneer at their own targets, like the village coquette: “Under a spreading Gainsborough hat / The village beauty stands, / A maiden very fair to see, / With tiny feet and hands, / As stately, too, as if she owned / The squire’s house and lands.”22 After the sprightly opening, however, the poem seems to forget why it was written. (Parodies are hard to sustain—many falter long before the end, and most are good only in fits and starts.) The original provides a formal scaffolding, so only a mild dash of cleverness, added to a large dose of maliciousness, is required to get parody up and running—if it follows the original rhyme-scheme too slavishly, however, the parodist may soon be backed into a corner. Very few parodies offer the integration of the original—the aesthetic logic, the progress of argument or narrative, the justice of an ending. When you look at twenty or thirty parodies of the same poem, how tedious most of them are! A good parody requires not much less talent than the original, and a great one perhaps a visitation of the demonic.
When Longfellow was forty-one, his infant daughter Frances died. Weeks later, he wrote “Resignation.” An infant’s death is heartbreaking—the death of a child was often a nineteenth-century excuse for weepy moralizing. Better artists used such deaths with a violence that drove past sentiment, though almost inevitably there were tears, too. Think of the dead children in Jude the Obscure, murdered by the half-brother who afterward hanged himself, leaving the terrible note: “Done because we are too menny.”23 There’s an apocryphal tale that crowds on the Manhattan docks waited for the crucial installment of The Old Curiosity Shop, shouting to an incoming ship, “Is Little Nell dead?”24 Still, the ferocious critic Francis Jeffrey was found sobbing over the fatal chapter, and the Irish MP Daniel O’Connell was so upset when he came to her death that he threw the novel out a train window.25 (On the other hand, Oscar Wilde characteristically remarked, “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.”)26
Then there’s Longfellow:
There is no flock, however watched and tended,
But one dead lamb is there!
There is no fireside, howsoe’er defended,
But has one vacant chair!
The air is full of farewells to the dying,
And mournings for the dead;
The heart of Rachel, for her children crying
Will not be comforted!27
The dead lamb is bad enough, but the busy clutch of exclamation points is worse, as is the poet’s reassurance in the following stanza that “oftentimes celestial benedictions / Assume this dark disguise.”28 Celestial benedictions! This is Longfellow at his most maudlin, taking the conventions of grief (“God works in mysterious ways,” “God will provide,” “She is going to a better place”) and wringing them for all the barley water he can. Like Satan’s discovery that for every hell there’s a hell still lower, you can never measure Longfellow’s sentiment, because there is always an abyss of it lower still.
Yet Longfellow did know terrible grief before and after the death of his daughter. His first wife died after a miscarriage while the couple were touring Europe; his second, the beloved Fanny, burned to death after passing her sleeve against a lit candle or stepping carelessly on a parlor match and igniting it. Longfellow suffered severe burns to his face while trying to put out the flames that engulfed her. To cover his scars, he grew the long beard. The depths of his anguish are unquestioned; but authenticity of feeling never guarantees the art, and Longfellow’s sorrow for his dead daughter did not prevent parody.
The long-forgotten poet Elizabeth Akers Allen wrote a reply to “Resignation” under the same title, a reply fairly sparkling with protofeminist irritation:
There is no sister-band, however tended,
But one young bride is there;—
There is no fire-side, howsoe’er defended,
But has one vacant chair.
Our home is full of mingled smiles and sighing,
Our fairest one has fled!
And baby Ned, for his lost sister crying,
Will not be comforted!29
She follows the original almost exactly, straying from the rhyme scheme only twice, often reusing Longfellow’s line, and on occasion nearly Longfellow’s stanza. Few nineteenth-century poets approach marriage with such a cocked eye—there were evil husbands enough in the literature of the day (the duke in “My Last Duchess” was the worst of a long line), but rarely such a sidelong glance at the institution. (Clough in Amours de Voyage is good on the travails of courtship, but Meredith’s excoriating “sonnets” in Modern Love are almost unreadable.)
Allen transforms Longfellow’s “What seem to us but sad, funereal tapers / May be heaven’s distant lamps”30 into “We read her marriage notice in the papers, / And trim hope’s brightest lamps.”31 Longfellow pictures the child in heaven:
In that great cloister’s stillness and seclusion,
By guardian angels led,
Safe from temptation, safe from sin’s pollution,
She lives, whom we call dead,
Day after day we think what she is doing
In those bright realms of air;
Year after year, her tender steps pursuing,
Behold her grown more fair.32
Allen offers instead the young wife in her new household, an obituary of ruined hopes:
In that great cloister’s stillness and seclusion,
By his old mother led,
Safe from “young company” and mirth’s intrusion,
She lives,—the same as dead.
Day after day we think what she is doing
In those old dismal rooms,
Year after year, her toilsome way pursuing
With stew-pans, mops and brooms.33
Marriage, these devastating stanzas imply, is a fate awful as death. “Her Father’s mansion” becomes “her husband’s mansion,” and “Christ himself doth rule,” tellingly, “own a husband’s rule.”34 The transformation is as neat as the stiletto Allen inserts into the bloated corpus of nineteenth-century sentiment.
Parody is always double edged and Janus faced—it must look sharply to its victim while looking out for itself, for a bad parody is worse than no parody at all. There is parody as comic burlesque and parody cunning in its criticism, parody purgative and parody merely parasitic (or perhaps epiphytic). Parody is the catcall or Bronx cheer to all things that take their seriousness too seriously—it supplies what has been left out or suppressed, offering mockery where there should have been self-mockery. Even Homer was parodied—and, if the catalogue of ships in book 2 of the Iliad were not the oldest section of the poem, it would be the earliest and most brilliant parody.
American literature at last came into its own in the decades of the 1840s and 1850s. Three generations after the Revolution, our poetry and fiction were still largely English colonies. Emerson had called for an American poetry in his essay “The Poet” (1844):
We have yet had no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable materials, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another carnival of the same gods whose picture he so much admires in Homer; then in the middle age; then in Calvinism. Banks and tariffs, the newspaper and caucus, methodism and unitarianism, are flat and dull to dull people, but rest on the same foundations of wonder as the town of Troy, and the temple of Delphos, and are as swiftly passing away.35
He was not long in receiving a reply. Perhaps Leaves of Grass was not quite the poetry Emerson imagined (if someone could have imagined it, it would have been written all the sooner); but Whitman embodied the breathless outrageousness of American life, using English as Americans did, without the pretense of London literary language.
Emerson’s call was not answered by Whitman alone. Longfellow had the learning and leanings of a classicist. Fluent at fourteen in Latin and Greek, he graduated four years later from Bowdoin. (At seven his headmaster had said that he stood in Latin “above several boys twice as old as he.”)36 During a three-year tour of Europe, he studied French, Spanish, and Italian, making a start on German and possibly Portuguese. After lecturing a few years at his alma mater, he spent another year and more in Europe, an offer from Harvard in hand, studying Swedish, Dutch, Danish, and Old Icelandic.37 By his late twenties, he was professor of modern languages at Harvard. The boy who translated Horace later became the first American translator of the Divine Comedy—it’s not surprising that he would look to his learning (and backward rather than forward) for a model that could shape American experience.
Among all the works of Western literature, Longfellow chose the Kalevala, the collection of heroic lays that became the national epic of Finland. (He adopted the standard Finnish meter of trochaic tetrameter probably in part for its strangeness to the American ear, though in all likelihood he knew the poem only in German translation.)38 The author, Elias Lönnrot, was one of the great collectors of folk songs, the equal of Bishop Percy or Francis James Child,39 but a collector with larger ambitions. Having mustered his raw material on numerous field trips, he composed the epic by fusing and editing the old lays, probably adding some new lines of his own.
Longfellow’s desire for an American saga, with a warrior who could stand among the ancient heroes, was grounded in contemporary study of early epic. The Icelandic Eddas were collections of individual lays—and by the eighteenth century some critics believed the Iliad and the Odyssey compiled from such preexisting songs. A gathering of passions informed the creation of The Song of Hiawatha, which the poet referred to as his “Indian Edda”:40 curiosity about American Indian folklore, not yet considered part of an American literature; sympathy for the race that had originally occupied the continent, mingled with a good deal of maundering; and knowledge that the Finnish tale was a modern construction. (The first version had been published in 1835, the year Longfellow traveled through northern Europe.)
This sense that America needed a literature of its own had been a long while simmering. In his commencement address at Bowdoin in 1825, Longfellow declared, “Thus shall our native hills become renowned in song, like those of Greece and Italy. Every rock shall become a chronicle of storied allusions; and the tomb of the Indian prophet be as hallowed as the sepulchres of ancient kings.”41 This from a boy of eighteen. Still in his twenties, he wrote in “Defence of Poetry,” “Let us have no more sky-larks and nightingales.… A painter might as well introduce an elephant or a rhinoceros into a New England landscape.” He claimed, “It is not necessary that the war-whoop should ring in every line, and every page be rife with scalps, tomahawks and wampum. Shade of Tecumseh forbid!”42 Yet a quarter of a century later, he succumbed.
Hiawatha arrived at an opportune moment for the poet. When we think of the modernists, we think how different they were from generations of poets, like the Romantics, able to devote their time to poetry. Eliot was a banker and an editor, Williams a pediatrician, Stevens an insurance executive, Frost a teacher and failed farmer, and Moore for a time editor of the Dial. (Only Pound supported himself entirely by his pen—yet even he had once been a college instructor of French and Spanish.) Such poets knew what it was like to earn money for something other than poetry. Their poems sometimes record the remnant memory of labor, and they each wrestled with finding hours for art after a day exhausted by work. To say that the honesties of labor wormed into the poetry might be an exaggeration—but, if the honesties can sometimes be found there, so can the dishonesties.
The modernists were not the first generation of American poets forced to earn a wage. Philip Freneau had been a ship captain and, farther back, Edward Taylor a preacher—such men would never have thought poetry an adequate (or perhaps even honorable) way to make a living. In pre-Revolutionary America, poetry could not have paid enough to support a man; after the Revolution, things were little better. Few writers of the American Renaissance made a living by the pen—what income they enjoyed came largely from American sales, for international copyright was in its infancy. Melville had been a sailor and became a customs inspector; Holmes was a doctor and Harvard professor; Whitman and Whittier, newspaper editors; Thoreau, a maker of pencils. Emerson—a pastor, then a lecturer; Hawthorne—weigher and gauger in the Boston Custom House, surveyor, then United States consul at Liverpool; Bryant—a lawyer and hog reeve of Great Barrington, but for most of his life a newspaper editor. Longfellow remained a college professor into his late forties.
Copyright law for American authors published in Britain started to change in the 1840s, but British authors went unprotected in America until the end of the century. Writers as important as Dickens, who received no American royalties for his early novels, might gain an official American publisher who still had to compete against a slew of pirates. Longfellow himself lost a fortune in British sales, but the great success of his epic in America meant that he never had to teach a class again.
The Song of Hiawatha was published in November 1855, a few months after Leaves of Grass. The poem was a very different response to Emerson’s call. Though the sage of Concord admired Longfellow’s poetry, his reaction was remarkably cool: “Sanborn brought me your good gift of Hiawatha.… I have always one foremost satisfaction in reading your books that I am safe—I am in variously skilful hands but first of all they are safe hands.”43 That is hardly the rousing endorsement offered Whitman: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career,” an arch piece of flattery the poet printed on the spine of the second edition of Leaves.44
Emerson was robustly ignorant about Indians, writing Longfellow, “The dangers of the Indians are, that they are really savage, have poor small sterile heads,—no thoughts, & you must deal very roundly with them, & find them in brains; and I blamed your tenderness now & then, as I read, in accepting a legend or a song, when they had so little to give.”45 “Savage” is too broad a brush, but he was not wrong about the raw violence that terrified settlers—Longfellow produced the Disney version of Indian life. If Emerson was cool, others were cooler—the reviewer for the Boston Daily Traveller wrote that “rendered into prose, Hiawatha would be a mass of the most childish nonsense that ever dropped from human pen.”46
Hiawatha, like Leaves of Grass, cast itself in a strange rhythm and found its ambition in native soil. Yet where Whitman used a medium that both was and was not American speech, Longfellow forced his mythic pastiche into the tub-thumping or tom-tomming Finnish meter (Longfellow was Vachel Lindsay before his time):
By the shores of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,
Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.
Dark behind it rose the forest,
Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees,
Rose the firs with cones upon them;
Bright before it beat the water,
Beat the clear and sunny water,
Beat the shining Big-Sea-Water.47
The ink was hardly dry before the parodies came rollicking forth. Hiawatha was, not just absurdly popular (the book almost sold out the day of publication, November 10), but widely imitated—a fashion for trochaic tetrameter was born on the instant. Two weeks later, in its weekly “Gossip” column, the New York Daily Times reported, “The madness of the hour takes the metrical shape of trochees, everybody writes trochaics, talks trochaics, and think[s] in trochees. People talk trochees in the street; merchants ask the price of raw material in that strain, and even ladies retail the scandal of the day in trochaic measure.” Examples were appended. Longfellow was called a “sort of Columbus in metres.”48
The morn of Christmas Eve, the Times reviewed a play opening that night at Wallack’s Theatre, one prefaced by what must have been the poem’s first published parody of real length:
Ask you—How about these verses,
Whence this song of Pocahontas,
With its flavor of Tobacco,
And the Stincweed—the Mundungus,
With its pipe of Old Virginny,
With the echo of the Breakdown,
With its smack of Bourbon whiskey,
With the twangle of the Banjo;
Of the Banjo—the Goatskinnet,
And the Fiddle—the Catgutto,
With the noisy Marrowbonum.49
This went on for some hundred lines. The playwright was John Brougham; the play, Po-ca-hon-tas; or, The Gentle Savage. Brougham’s lines are much closer to American demotic than Longfellow’s charmless sublime, which is like a preparatory oil sketch for some wall-filling mural of the northern woods. With the catgut fiddle and goatskin banjo (you can find twangle in Walter Scott: the “Spaniard did nothing but stalk about and twangle his guitar”),50 the clatter of the marrow bones, the whiskey and the rollick of the breakdown, the poem catches the nervy boisterousness of American life—recall Whitman’s “I loiter enjoying his repartee and his shuffle and breakdown.”51 The breakdown was a riotous improvisation of leaps and kicks. In a version shot by Edison on kinetoscope in 1894, the dancer leans, falls over on his back, and somersaults upright—it’s the ancestor of breakdancing. Brougham saw something American in the meter’s rough cascade. Perhaps Longfellow thought that his catchy trochaics provided, not just an American idiom, but an American rhythm.
The opening night of Po-ca-hon-tas came days before Longfellow’s epic was itself reviewed in the Times. The review was not kind:
We doubt very much if Mr. Longfellow has done the world of poesy any service by producing it.… In “Hiawatha,” grotesque, absurd and savage as the groundwork is, Mr. Longfellow has woven over it a profuse wreath of his own poetic elegancies. It resembles a Hindoo monster, which, having lain neglected in the temple, has been sought by the ivy or the woodbine, that, clambering over its hideous features, have masked the deformity with exquisite foliage.… It is only when you have thrust the adventitious growth aside that you start to find yourself face to face with the ugly, clumsy monster.… “Hiawatha” is an experiment and—a failure.52
The high-toned mythmaking of Hiawatha presents a version of the Indian suitable for the ears of schoolchildren (ritual mutilations and the near slavery of Indian women, for example, go unmentioned). The Indian tales Longfellow adapted, heavily reworked and rewritten, came already filtered through the scarcely reliable versions of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft.53 They are little better than James Fenimore Cooper’s fancies about the Mohicans, which Twain treated with admirable contempt. Though in 1855 those willing to speak well of the Indian were a minority, Whitman’s detached portrayal of a wilderness marriage (“I saw the marriage of the trapper in the open air in the far-west.… the bride was a red girl”)54 was far more unsettling than Longfellow’s whimsies. Such unions were common in the west, where they attracted little comment even late in the century—the Indian wife, always useful as a translator, was called a “sleeping dictionary,” and the children were often considered great beauties.
Hawthorne, Longfellow’s friend and classmate at Bowdoin, thought Hiawatha the “annexation of a new dominion to our poetical territories”55 (he was probably recalling the annexation of Texas a decade before), yet he enclosed in a letter to his publisher some verses he’d been sent:
Hiawatha! Hiawatha!
Sweet Trochaic milk and water!
Milk and water Mississipi [sic]
Flowing o’er a bed of sugar!
Through three hundred Ticknor pages,
With a murmur and a ripple,
Flowing, flowing, ever flowing—
Dam the river!—damn the poet!56
Hawthorne was delighted when one of his friends, Henry Bright, satirized him in the measure:
Should you ask me, “Who is Hawthorne?
Who this Hawthorne that you mention?”
I should answer, I should tell you,
“He’s a Yankee, who has written
Many books you must have heard of;
For he wrote ‘The Scarlet Letter’
And ‘The House of Seven Gables,’
Wrote, too, ‘Rappacini’s Daughter,’
And a lot of other stories;—
Some are long, and some are shorter;
Some are good, and some are better.
And this Hawthorne is a Consul,
Sitting in a dismal office,—
Dark and dirty, dingy office,
Full of mates, and full of captains,
Full of sailors and of niggers,—
And he lords it over Yankees.”57
Parodies of epics cannot follow the model line by line—they must steal whatever they will of the manner and remain loyal to the form while finding a subject intolerant of the original. Long parodies are therefore the more suited to comic invention. The parodists realized something Longfellow could not: that the measure was far better adapted to burlesque than to weepy tragedy and that the variations and repetitions that make Hiawatha so wearisome were already comic by misadventure if not intent. Some poems are self-parodic before they’re ever parodied.
The year after publication, Hiawatha was subjected to a book-length parody, The Song of Milgenwater, “translated from the original Feejee” by Marc Antony Henderson, “Professor of the Feejee Language and Literature in the Brandywine Female Academy.”58 (Feejee or Feegee was the contemporary spelling of Fiji.) This was the first edition—in the second, issued the same year, the hero was rechristened Milkenwatha. Lest the reader not get the joke, the new publisher was “Tickell & Grinne.” Longfellow’s poem remained popular enough that third and fourth editions of The Song of Milkanwatha were issued some thirty years later.
Henderson, the pseudonym of Reverend George A. Strong, had a viper’s sense of Longfellow’s weaknesses. His answer to the inane passage on “Hiawatha’s Wooing” (which opens, “ ‘As unto the bow the cord is, / So unto the man is woman, / Though she bends him, she obeys him, / Though she draws him, yet she follows’ ”)59 achieved by wit what Elizabeth Akers Allen did by wry substitution.
Just as, to a big umbrella,
Is the handle, when it’s raining,
So a wife is, to her husband;
Though the handle do support it,
’T is the top keeps all the rain off;
Though the top gets all the wetting,
’T is the handle bears the burden;
So the top is good for nothing,
If there isn’t any handle,
And the case holds, vice versa.60
To this passage, he added a sly note: “Umbrellas are known to have been in common use in these islands, from the earliest times. They are, invariably, constructed of sheet tin.”61 So much for the usefulness of women—or men.
In Longfellow’s version, Hiawatha’s wife, Minnehaha, dies during a famine. Henderson does not permit such tragedy—at the climax of the tale, Milkanwatha’s Pogee contracts a fever the savage doctors prove unable to cure. Seemingly dead, she is wrapped in a blanket and dropped unceremoniously into the river. Milkanwatha leaves his people to follow her body but finds her miraculously restored:
For the water’s sudden coldness,
From her silent stupor waked her,
From the swooning of the Fever,
Which, in vain the wise old doctors,
Which the Ague, vainly shaking,
Tried to make her wake up out of,
In the wigwam of Marcosset;
And our hero, rushing to her,
Clasped her in his arms, exclaiming,
“Lo! I see, my duck, my darling,
See the moral of this matter,
See the lesson that it teaches;
What the Allopathic Practice
Was unable to accomplish,
Lo! How quickly was effected
By the Plunge-bath, and the Blanket,
By the use of Hydropathy.”62
Milkanwatha vows to return to his village, bearing this remarkable medical advance. Longfellow, as it happens, was himself a fervent believer in hydropathy—“It is useless for me to reiterate, like an idiot or a parrot,” he wrote a friend, “my one idea ‘Water Cure.’ ”63 (Allopathy was the term used by homeopaths for modern medicine, presumably unavailing in this case. Henderson’s portrayal of the tribal doctors examining Pogee’s tongue and then uselessly wailing and lamenting is a neat and nasty turn.)
The parodist had an acute ear for Longfellow’s absurdities—he matches the poet’s dewy-eyed embrace of Indian names:
Here he saw the Melee-wee-git,
Lightning-bug, the Melee-wee-git,
Saw the Feesh-go-bang, musquito,
Saw Snappo, the pinching-beetle,
Saw the dragon-fly, Snap-peter,
And the flea, Sticka-sting-wa-in.64
The names sound like island Pidgin—but perhaps some of the jokes are now lost. Sticka-sting-wa-in is approximately “Stick-a-sting-in” (in the third edition, the line was altered to “And the flea, too, Sticka-ta-wa-in”).65 Is Melee-wee-git “Mealy Widget”? No, because “widget” dates to almost a century after. A “get” was a child or offspring (i.e., something gotten or begotten), so a “wee get” would have been a runt or small child, “melee” perhaps combining the sense of mealy and melee. “Brek-e-kex-co-ax, the bull-frog,” which figures elsewhere, is of course an allusion to Aristophanes.66 Parodists and their audiences were learnèd in those days.
Longfellow’s soothing adaptations of Schoolcraft’s Indian myths find their match in the tale of Bee-del, the fat brave (from “beadle,” no doubt—like Mr. Bumble, made the butt in Oliver Twist two decades before). It also gives Henderson an opportunity to mock Longfellow’s slightly ridiculous and longwinded manner:
But he waddled from the corner,
From the wigwam slowly waddled,
Went and stood upon the hill-side,
Slowly sat down, slowly laid down,
Doubled up and started rolling;
Rolled right onward, forward, downward,
Down the green and sloping hill-side,
Down the hill-side kept a-rolling;
And his mother stood and watched him,
Wond’ring when he ’d stop a-rolling.
Nothing more was heard of Bee-del,
For six months and something over;
But, one morning, while a-baking,
Bee-del’s mother heard a rumbling,
Like a big stone, tumbling downward
From the hill-top, up above her;
Went and looked, and there came Bee-del,
Came the fat man, rolling, rumbling,
Came a-rolling toward the wigwam,
Came and rolled in through the back-door,
Rolled right up into the corner,
And remained rolled up, in silence.67
Bee-del, it turns out, has rolled all the way around the globe.
The most notorious savaging of Longfellow’s style, however, derived from the passage on Hiawatha’s mittens:
He had mittens, Minjekahwun,
Magic mittens made of deer-skin;
When upon his hands he wore them,
He could smite the rocks asunder,
He could grind them into powder.68
Henderson could not resist the temptation offered:
From the squirrel-skin, Marcosset
Made some mittens for our hero,
Mittens with the fur-side, inside,
With the fur-side next his fingers
So ’s to keep the hand warm inside;
That was why she put the fur-side—
Why she put the fur-side, inside.69
This has in turn been endlessly elaborated by other parodists. Herbert Ponting, the photographer for Robert Falcon Scott’s disastrous South Pole expedition, wrote a wearyingly long contribution titled “The Sleeping-Bag,”70 which might now seem funnier but for his association with tragedy.
It’s hard to imagine a book-length parody of an epic these days, but then we have so few epics. Indeed, there was one parody even longer than Milkanwatha—namely, Plu-ri-bus-tah: A Song That’s-By-No-Author, by Q. K. Philander Doesticks, also published in 1856.71 No book of American poetry before or after Hiawatha so quickly attracted humorists trying to cash in on a sudden craze, though no doubt Leaves of Grass would have been more widely parodied had Whitman sold as many as copies as Longfellow.
If the original has a form telling enough, the parody no longer need refer to the source at all—the form alone is enough to call it to mind, no matter how distant the subject from Indian maidens or mittens. In an anonymous poem from the New York Evening Mirror (taken here from its reprinting in the Perth Gazette), a girl named Pinky Winky badgers her father to tell her the best breakfast food. As she rejects each in turn, his replies grow increasingly indignant and her despair ever greater. One of his suggestions is “sausage”:
At this answer, Pinky Winky
Turned her little saucy nose up,
Saying pertly, smartly, tartly:
Sausage, sausage, always sausage—
I am tired to death of sausage—
Sausages are fat and greasy
Sometimes made ’tis said of puppies;
Puppies juvenile and tender,
Which come to their end untimely.
No, my venerable Father,
If you love your Pinky Winky,
Don’t by any means have sausage!72
One of the Forty-Niners (many of them Australians) thought this the finest parody of Hiawatha he had read.73
Parody is often passive-aggressive when not simply aggressive—it conceals an attack beneath a mask of humor. (Chaucer’s phrase was the “smiler with the knife.”)74 Once the parodies have severed themselves from the subject, something is lost—or everything is lost, except the absurdity of the form itself. It takes no great poetic gift to ramble on in Longfellow’s form—an unpublished parody might have been called “An Ode to Mud”:
Gracious town is Kennebunkport,
With its houses white and clapboard,
Roofs of gray and closely shingled,
Picket fences need much tending,
Rotten fences to be mended
By the moleskin-trousered workman,
Whitewashed by the low-browed painter,
By the paint-bedaubèd painter.
Streets of mud are heavy going
In the town of Kennebunkport,
Rains come falling in all seasons,
Mud that blooms in walks and alleys,
Mud that sticks to boots and dresses,
Mud upon the stoop and doorstone,
Mud upon the stairway railing,
Mud on coverlet and quilt-top,
Mud in closet, mud on curtain,
Mud on Bridie’s nose and apron,
Mud that marches to the parlor,
Mud within the sacred parlor,
Worked into the Turkey carpet
Like a sacramental object—
Sacrilegious, mud on carpets;
Blasphemous, the mud returning;
Resurrected, six months running.75
Still, something lost may be resurrected if the parodist has genius, and perhaps the only comic genius who treated Hiawatha was Lewis Carroll. The title of his parody was “Hiawatha’s Photographing,” first published in the magazine The Train in 1857. It opens:
From his shoulder Hiawatha
Took the camera of rosewood—
Made of sliding, folding rosewood—
Neatly put it all together.
In its case it lay compactly,
Folded into nearly nothing;
But he opened out the hinges,
Pushed and pulled the joints and hinges,
Till it looked all squares and oblongs,
Like a complicated figure
In the second book of Euclid.
This he perched upon a tripod,
And the family, in order,
Sat before him for their pictures—
Mystic, awful, was the process.
First, a piece of glass he coated
With collodion, and plunged it
In a bath of lunar caustic
Carefully dissolved in water—
There he left it certain minutes.
Secondly, my Hiawatha
Made with cunning hand a mixture
Of the acid pyrro-gallic,
And of glacial-acetic,
And of alcohol and water—
This developed all the picture.
Finally, he fixed each picture
With a saturate solution
Which was made of hyposulphite
Which, again, was made of soda.
(Very difficult the name is
For a metre like the present,
But periphrasis has done it.)76
The parenthetical metacommentary is reminiscent of a parody in Punch the year before: “Henry Wadsworth, whose adnomen / (Coming awkward, for the accents, / Into this his latest rhythm).”77 Photography was an art in which even amateurs could excel—Oliver Wendell Holmes was an enthusiast who invented the handheld stereoscope. Carroll was himself a photographer of extraordinary gifts, so perhaps some of his frustration with sitters leaked into his hilarious polemic.
Hiawatha provoked a poetic ingenuity unavailable in most parodies of Longfellow. Carroll had too much good sense to overdo the original’s tedious repetitions. In his poem, Hiawatha tries to take portraits of the members of a large English family, but each photo fails miserably. The sitters individually reveal themselves to the artist, despite the failure of the art. The mother, for example:
She came dressed beyond description,
Dressed in jewels and in satin,
Far too gorgeous for an empress.
Gracefully she sat down sideways,
With a simper scarcely human,
Holding in her hand a nosegay
Rather larger than a cabbage.
All the while that she was taking,
Still the lady chattered, chattered,
Like a monkey in the forest.78
The subject has turned from Longfellow to Victorian pretensions (the portrait of the eldest son makes quiet fun of Ruskin), the very pretensions so crucial, across the Atlantic, to the high-collared manners embodied in Longfellow’s verse. His attitudes were so stalwart, so T-squared, so tightly waistcoated, he exemplified middle-class sententiousness—Longfellow wrote poetry of the parlor, by the parlor, and for the parlor. Carroll’s cruelties are not only to the style—they also attack this poet’s unhappy lack of cynicism. Carroll was ideally placed as a captious observer of the mores of the day—he indulged here in social observation that rarely reached the pages of the Alice books (it permeated Sylvie and Bruno, of course, which was distinctly unpopular).79
The case could be made that Carroll was parodying only the medium of Longfellow’s verse—he may not have cared a fig for Indians. The civilized Hiawatha, however, was an implicit criticism of the ambitions of America itself, those less agreeable manifestations of Manifest Destiny. What was the purpose of empire but civilizing the savage, of someday making all the savage Hiawathas into portrait photographers? Besides, who are the real barbarians in Carroll’s poem? Here the parodist has become a satirist.
Carroll takes up the case of the eldest daughter, who
Only begged she might be taken
With her look of “passive beauty.”
Her idea of passive beauty
Was a squinting of the left-eye,
Was a drooping of the right-eye,
Was a smile that went up sideways
To the corner of the nostrils.80
“Passive beauty” was an ideal of the day and goes back at least as far as Wordsworth’s “And to enliven in the mind’s regard / Thy passive beauty,”81 spoken of his baby daughter. Eventually the poor photographer gives up trying his portraits severally:
Finally, my Hiawatha
Tumbled all the tribe together
(“Grouped” is not the right expression),
And, as happy chance would have it,
Did at last obtain a picture
Where the faces all succeeded:
Each came out a perfect likeness.
Then they joined and all abused it—
Unrestrainedly abused it—
As “the worst and ugliest picture
That could possibly be taken.
Giving one such strange expressions!
Sulkiness, conceit, and meanness!
Really any one would take us
(Any one that did not know us)
For the most unpleasant people!”
(Hiawatha seemed to think so—
Seemed to think it not unlikely.)
All together rang their voices—
Angry, loud, discordant voices—
As of dogs that howl in concert,
As of cats that wail in chorus.82
Perhaps the howling dogs and wailing cats are the adequate symbols of Longfellow’s verse. As a poet, he was always a little more interested in sound than sense, if we can include the sentimentalities that lie beneath sense. The sonorities that reached a dead end with Swinburne and are irritating even in Poe and Tennyson lodged all too early in Longfellow (Carroll in another mood might have called them snorities). The Fireside Poets (Longfellow, Bryant, Holmes, Lowell, Whittier) were all afflicted by a taste for beauty oversugared and full of niceties of self-regard, which to the more jaundiced reader look like niceties of humiliation. Generations of grade-school students were browbeaten to get such verse by heart—how much livelier the school day might have been had they been required to memorize Carroll or Henderson instead.
Longfellow no doubt had a sense of humor, but not about his poetry. Of the many parodies he suffered, he wrote in 1870 that the “better they are done, the worse they are in their effects; for one cannot get rid of them, but ever after sees them making faces behind the original.”83 There are parodies after which the original survives, more or less unscathed (the author perhaps even flattered by the attention), and parodies after which the original can never be read in quite the same way. A poet well parodied seems to get no worse than he deserves—the parodist is only a critic not afraid to make faces. To those who do not like a poet’s verse (and even to some who do), parody provides a cathartic release. Parody is the daimon that rescues poetry from its better nature, for in poetry the better angel is always Lucifer in disguise.
Longfellow’s verse suffered from his ambitions. It was not the worst thing to have conceived an American epic so early in the history of the republic, nor was it preposterous to attempt to reduce the scattered tales of the American Indian to the kind of artificial narrative that shaped the Kalevala. (The myths prove more interesting as anthropology than as literature.) A poet a little circumspect might have seen that the idea was fatally crippled by the sentimental views Longfellow adopted for nearly everything that came under his pen, but they were the views of the age. The poet of Craigie House was always ripe for parody—had he not existed, the parodists would have had to invent him.