We spoke of Hiawatha, then a recent publication. Mr. Everett thought that Longfellow transgressed artistic rules, and was disobedient to literary precedent in translating Indian names in the text of the poem. The repetition of “Minnehaha—Laughing Water,” “The West Wind—Mudjekeewis,” “Ishkooda—the Comet,” etcetera, was affected and tedious.
“Moreover,” he continued, smiling, “I have serious doubts respecting the florid metaphors and highly figurative speech which Cooper and other writers of North American Indian stories have put into the mouths of their dusky heroes.” He went on to say that, when Governor of Massachusetts, he received a deputation of aborigines from the Far West. In anticipation of the visit, he primed himself with an ornate address of welcome, couched in the figurative language he imagined would be familiar and agreeable to the chiefs. This was delivered through an interpreter, and received in blank silence. Then the principal sachem replied in curt platitudes, with never a trope or allegorical allusion. Mr. Everett added that he had learned since that the vocabulary of the modern Indian is meagre and prosaic in the extreme.
The justice of the observation was borne in upon me when I sat in James Redpath’s box at the Indian Exhibition I have spoken of in another chapter, and heard snatches of alleged oratory as transmitted by a fluent interpreter to the Newark audience. Anything more tame and bare it would be hard to imagine.
XXX
A MUSICAL CONVENTION—GEORGE FRANCIS ROOT—WHEN “THE SHINING SHORE” WAS FIRST SUNG—THE HALLELUJAH CHORUS—BETROTHAL—DEMPSTER IN HIS OLD AGE
Reversing the wheel of Time by a turn or two, we are in the thick of preparations for the Christmas of 1855.
It is less than a year since I read and re-read a letter that had lain among the leaves of my journal for a long term of years. It was never read by any eyes except my own, and those of him who wrote it. In the solemn conviction that for any other—no matter how near of kin and dear of heart—to look upon the lines, would be profanation, I burned the old letter. Life is short and uncertain. I would take no risks. And what need of keeping what I can never lose while memory remains faithful to her trust?
I require no written or printed record to remind me what set that Yule-tide apart from all the anniversaries that had preceded it, and distinguished it from all that were to follow in its train.
We had had a guest in the house for three weeks. A Musical Convention—the first ever held in Richmond—was in session under the conduct of Lowell Mason and George Francis Root. My father, my sister, my brother Herbert, and myself were members of a flourishing Sacred Music Society, composed principally of amateurs, and we had engaged the distinguished leaders in the profession to preside over the Conference, by which it was hoped public taste in the matter of choir and congregational singing might be improved. Classes were formed for the study of methods and for drill in vocalization. The course would be closed by a grand concert, in which no professional artists would take part.