The period from 1847 to 1863 was, all things considered, quite the most fruitful for Longfellow; and this contained no five titles to rival “Evangeline” (1847), “The Song of Hiawatha” (1855), “The Courtship of Miles Standish” (1858), “The New England Tragedy” (first form, 1860), and “Tales of a Wayside Inn” (1863). Thus, although he by no means abandoned Europe and the thoughts of Europe, he came at last and altogether naturally to the development of American tradition and the American scene. The immediate success of “Evangeline” (for five thousand copies were sold within two months) is easy to understand. The material was fresh and the story was lovely. Longfellow’s reading-public, accustomed to certain charms and qualities in his work, found these no less attractively displayed in the long story than in his brief lyrics. The pastoral scene at the start, the dramatic episode of the separation, the long vista of American scenes presented in Evangeline’s vain search, and the final rounding out of the story plot, all belong to a “good seller”; and as it happened there was in America in 1847 no widely popular novelist. The field belonged to the author of “Evangeline” even more completely then a half century earlier it had belonged to the author of “Marmion,” on the other side of the sea.
In the journal of 1849 appears the entry, “And now I hope to try a loftier strain, the sublimer Song whose broken melodies have for so many years breathed through my soul in the better hours of life.” This was a reference to “The Golden Legend,” which appeared in 1851, and which was in the end to become part of “Christus,” completed not until 1872. In a sense this was the most ambitious and least effective of all his undertakings. It was too scholastic for the public; it was not a fit avenue to the feelings of “the people” whom in 1840 he had resolved to stir. By 1854 Longfellow entered in the journal, “I have at length hit upon a plan for a poem on the American Indians, which seems to me the right one and the only.” This was to do with the traditions of the red man what Malory had done with the Arthurian story and what Tennyson was soon to be reweaving into the “Idylls of the King.” Schoolcraft’s Indian researches put the material into his hands, and the Finnish epic “Kalevala” supplied the suggestion for the appropriate measure. It appeared in 1855 and was demanded by the public in repeated printings.
“Hiawatha” has a double assurance of wide and lasting fame in the fact that it appeals to young and old in different ways. It appeals to children because it is made up of a succession of picturesque stories of action. Their lack of plots is no defect to the youthful reader—nothing could be more plotless then the various parts of “Gulliver’s Travels”—and on the other hand few children detect or care for the scheme underlying them as a whole. They are as vivid and circumstantial as “Gulliver” or as “Pilgrim’s Progress.” Furthermore they deal with human types which belong to all romantic legend: Hiawatha, the hero; Minnehaha, the heroine; Chibiabos, the sweet singer, or artist; Kwasind, the strong man, or primitive force; Pau-Puk-Keewis, the mischief-maker, or the comic spirit,—any child will recognize them for example in Robin Hood, Maid Marian, Allan-a-Dale, Will Scarlet, and Friar Tuck. Again, these human types are extended over into the animal world and even to the forces of nature, the latter, by the way, supplying frequently the place of the indispensable villain or obstacle between the hero and the achievement of his purposes.
Unhappily the average adult who has read it in early life assumes that he has advanced beyond “Hiawatha,” that he can put it away with other childish things, not realizing how much more than meets the eye resides within its lines. Moreover, some grown-ups who do attempt a second reading are dissatisfied because their minds have stopped between childhood and maturity, stunted by too heavy a diet on obvious fiction and the daily newspapers. For the later reading of “Hiawatha” demands the kind of intellectual maturity that can cope with “Paradise Lost” or “Sartor Resartus” or “In Memoriam” or the classics which are quite beyond the child. The genuinely mature reader appreciates that the legends and the ballads of a people are never limited to external significance and that, whoever may happen to be the hero, it is the people who are represented through him. So the epic note emerges for him who can hear it. A peace is declared among the warring tribes; Hiawatha is sent by Mudjekeewis back to live and toil among his people; he is commended by Mondamin because he prays “For advantage of the nations”; he fights the pestilence to save the people; he divides his trophies of battle with them; and he departs when the advent of the white man marks the doom of the Indian. And so the ordering of the parts is ethnic, tracing the Indian chronicle through the stages that all peoples have traversed, from the nomad life of hunting and fishing to primitive agriculture and community life; thus come song and festival, a common religion and a common fund of legend, and finally, in the tragic life of this people, come the decline of strength, in the death of Kwasind, the passing of song with Chibiabos, and the departure of national heroism as Hiawatha is lost to view,
In the glory of the sunset,
In the purple mists of evening.
It is no mean achievement to write a children’s classic, but the enduring fact about “Hiawatha” is that it is a genuine epic as well.
No other poem of Longfellow’s is so well adjusted in form and content. The fact of first importance is not that Longfellow derived the measure from a Finnish epic but that the primitive epic form is perfect because it is the natural, unstudied way of telling a primitive story. The forms of literature that go back nearest to the people in their origins are simple in rhythm and built up of parallel repetitions. This marks a distinction between the epics about nations written in a later age, such as the Iliad and the Æneid and the works of Milton, and the epics of early and unknown authorship, such as the “Nibelungenlied” and “Beowulf.” It was Longfellow’s gift to combine the old material with a fittingly primitive measure, joining as only poet and scholar could
... legends and traditions
With the odors of the forest,