Thursday's Serial: “The Song of Hiawatha” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (in English) - VIII

 

BOOK VIII.

HIAWATHA'S FISHING.

Forth upon the Gitche Gumee,

On the shining Big-Sea-Water,

With his fishing-line of cedar,

Of the twisted bark of cedar,

Forth to catch the sturgeon Nahma,

Mishe-Nahma, King of Fishes,

In his birch canoe exulting

All alone went Hiawatha.

Through the clear, transparent water

He could see the fishes swimming

Far down in the depths below him;

See the yellow perch, the Sahwa,

Like a sunbeam in the water,

See the Shawgashee, the craw-fish,

Like a spider on the bottom,

On the white and sandy bottom.

At the stern sat Hiawatha,

With his fishing-line of cedar;

In his plumes the breeze of morning

Played as in the hemlock branches;

On the bows, with tail erected,

Sat the squirrel, Adjidaumo;

In his fur the breeze of morning

Played as in the prairie grasses.

On the white sand of the bottom

Lay the monster Mishe-Nahma,

Lay the sturgeon, King of Fishes;

Through his gills he breathed the water,

With his fins he fanned and winnowed,

With his tail he swept the sand-floor.

There he lay in all his armor;

On each side a shield to guard him,

Plates of bone upon his forehead,

Down his sides and back and shoulders

Plates of bone with spines projecting!

Painted was he with his war-paints,

Stripes of yellow, red, and azure,

Spots of brown and spots of sable;

And he lay there on the bottom,

Fanning with his fins of purple,

As above him Hiawatha

In his birch canoe came sailing,

With his fishing line of cedar.

"Take my bait!" cried Hiawatha,

Down into the depths beneath him,

"Take my bait, O Sturgeon, Nahma!

Come up from below the water,

Let us see which is the stronger!"

And he dropped his line of cedar

Through the clear, transparent water,

Waited vainly for an answer,

Long sat waiting for an answer,

And repeating loud and louder,

"Take my bait, O King of Fishes!"

Quiet lay the sturgeon, Nahma,

Fanning slowly in the water,

Looking up at Hiawatha,

Listening to his call and clamor,

His unnecessary tumult,

Till he wearied of the shouting;

And he said to the Kenozha,

To the pike, the Maskenozha,

"Take the bait of this rude fellow,

Break the line of Hiawatha!"

In his fingers Hiawatha

Felt the loose line jerk and tighten;

As he drew it in, it tugged so

That the birch canoe stood endwise,

Like a birch log in the water,

With the squirrel, Adjidaumo,

Perched and frisking on the summit.

Full of scorn was Hiawatha

When he saw the fish rise upward,

Saw the pike, the Maskenozha,

Coming nearer, nearer to him,

And he shouted through the water,

"Esa! esa! Shame upon you!

You are but the pike, Kenozha,

You are not the fish I wanted,

You are not the King of Fishes!"

Reeling downward to the bottom

Sank the pike in great confusion,

And the mighty sturgeon, Nahma,

Said to Ugudwash, the sun-fish,

"Take the bait of this great boaster,

Break the line of Hiawatha!"

Slowly upward, wavering, gleaming

Like a white moon in the water,

Rose the Ugudwash, the sun-fish,

Seized the line of Hiawatha,

Swung with all his weight upon it,

Made a whirlpool in the water,

Whirled the birch canoe in circles,

Round and round in gurgling eddies,

Till the circles in the water

Reached the far-off sandy beaches,

Till the water-flags and rushes

Nodded on the distant margins.

But when Hiawatha saw him

Slowly rising through the water,

Lifting his great disc of whiteness,

Loud he shouted in derision,

"Esa! esa! shame upon you!

You are Ugudwash, the sun-fish,

You are not the fish I wanted,

You are not the King of Fishes!"

Wavering downward, white and ghastly,

Sank the Ugudwash, the sun-fish,

And again the sturgeon, Nahma,

Heard the shout of Hiawatha,

Heard his challenge of defiance,

The unnecessary tumult,

Ringing far across the water.

From the white sand of the bottom

Up he rose with angry gesture,

Quivering in each nerve and fibre,

Clashing all his plates of armor,

Gleaming bright with all his war-paint;

In his wrath he darted upward,

Flashing leaped into the sunshine,

Opened his great jaws, and swallowed

Both canoe and Hiawatha.

Down into that darksome cavern

Plunged the headlong Hiawatha,

As a log on some black river

Shoots and plunges down the rapids,

Found himself in utter darkness,

Groped about in helpless wonder,

Till he felt a great heart beating,

Throbbing in that utter darkness.

And he smote it in his anger,

With his fist, the heart of Nahma,

Felt the mighty King of Fishes

Shudder through each nerve and fibre,

Heard the water gurgle round him

As he leaped and staggered through it,

Sick at heart, and faint and weary.

Crosswise then did Hiawatha

Drag his birch-canoe for safety,

Lest from out the jaws of Nahma,

In the turmoil and confusion,

Forth he might be hurled and perish.

And the squirrel, Adjidaumo,

Frisked and chattered very gayly,

Toiled and tugged with Hiawatha

Till the labor was completed.

Then said Hiawatha to him,

"O my little friend, the squirrel,

Bravely have you toiled to help me;

Take the thanks of Hiawatha,

And the name which now he gives you;

For hereafter and for ever

Boys shall call you Adjidaumo,

Tail-in-air the boys shall call you!"

And again the sturgeon, Nahma,

Gasped and quivered in the water,

Then was still, and drifted landward

Till he grated on the pebbles,

Till the listening Hiawatha

Heard him grate upon the margin,

Felt him strand upon the pebbles,

Knew that Nahma, King of Fishes,

Lay there dead upon the margin.

Then he heard a clang and napping,

As of many wings assembling,

Heard a screaming and confusion,

As of birds of prey contending,

Saw a gleam of light above him,

Shining through the ribs of Nahma,

Saw the glittering eyes of sea-gulls,

Of Kayoshk, the sea-gulls, peering,

Gazing at him through the opening,

Heard them saying to each other,

"'T is our brother, Hiawatha!"

And he shouted from below them,

Cried exulting from the caverns:

"O ye sea-gulls! O my brothers!

I have slain the sturgeon, Nahma;

Make the rifts a little larger,

With your claws the openings widen,

Set me free from this dark prison,

And henceforward and for ever

Men shall speak of your achievements,

Calling you Kayoshk, the sea-gulls,

Yes, Kayoshk, the Noble Scratchers!"

And the wild and clamorous sea-gulls

Toiled with beak and claws together,

Made the rifts and openings wider

In the mighty ribs of Nahma,

And from peril and from prison,

From the body of the sturgeon,

From the peril of the water,

Was released my Hiawatha.

He was standing near his wigwam,

On the margin of the water,

And he called to old Nokomis,

Called and beckoned to Nokomis,

Pointed to the sturgeon, Nahma,

Lying lifeless on the pebbles,

With the sea-gulls feeding on him.

"I have slain the Mishe-Nahma,

Slain the King of Fishes!" said he;

"Look! the sea-gulls feed upon him,

Yes, my friend Kayoshk, the sea-gulls;

Drive them not away, Nokomis,

They have saved me from great peril

In the body of the sturgeon,

Wait until their meal is ended,

Till their craws are full with feasting,

Till they homeward fly, at sunset,

To their nests among the marshes;

Then bring all your pots and kettles,

And make oil for us in Winter."

And she waited till the sun set,

Till the pallid moon, the night-sun,

Rose above the tranquil water,

Till Kayoshk, the sated sea-gulls,

From their banquet rose with clamor,

And across the fiery sunset

Winged their way to far-off islands,

To their nests among the rushes.

To his sleep went Hiawatha,

And Nokomis to her labor,

Toiling patient in the moonlight,

Till the sun and moon changed places,

Till the sky was red with sunrise,

And Kayoshk, the hungry sea-gulls,

Came back from the reedy islands,

Clamorous for their morning banquet.

Three whole days and nights alternate

Old Nokomis and the sea-gulls

Stripped the oily flesh of Nahma,

Till the waves washed through the rib-bones,

Till the sea-gulls came no longer,

And upon the sands lay nothing

But the skeleton of Nahma.

Wednesday's Good Reading: "To Chatterton" by John Keats (in English)

 

O Chatterton! how very sad thy fate!

Dear child of sorrow—son of misery!

How soon the film of death obscur'd that eye,

Whence Genius mildly flash'd, and high debate.

How soon that voice, majestic and elate,

Melted in dying numbers! Oh! how nigh

Was night to thy fair morning. Thou didst die

A half-blown flow'ret which cold blasts amate.

But this is past: thou art among the stars

Of highest Heaven: to the rolling spheres

Thou sweetly singest: nought thy hymning mars,

Above the ingrate world and human fears.

On earth the good man base detraction bars

From thy fair name, and waters it with tears.

 

 

Tuesday's Serial: “Green Mansions: A Romance of the Tropical Forest” by W. H. Hudson - I.

 

FOREWORD   

I take up pen for this foreword with the fear of one who knows that he cannot do justice to his subject, and the trembling of one who would not, for a good deal, set down words unpleasing to the eye of him who wrote Green Mansions, The Purple Land, and all those other books which have meant so much to me. For of all living authors—now that Tolstoy has gone I could least dispense with W. H. Hudson. Why do I love his writing so?  I think because he is, of living writers that I read, the rarest spirit, and has the clearest gift of conveying to me the nature of that spirit. Writers are to their readers little new worlds to be explored; and each traveler in the realms of literature must needs have a favorite hunting ground, which, in his good will—or perhaps merely in his egoism—he would wish others to share with him.

The great and abiding misfortunes of most of us writers are twofold: We are, as worlds, rather common tramping-ground for our readers, rather tame territory; and as guides and dragomans thereto we are too superficial, lacking clear intimacy of expression; in fact—like guide or dragoman—we cannot let folk into the real secrets, or show them the spirit, of the land.

Now, Hudson, whether in a pure romance like this Green Mansions, or in that romantic piece of realism The Purple Land, or in books like Idle Days in Patagonia, Afoot in England, The Land's End, Adventures among Birds, A Shepherd's Life, and all his other nomadic records of communings with men, birds, beasts, and Nature, has a supreme gift of disclosing not only the thing he sees but the spirit of his vision. Without apparent effort he takes you with him into a rare, free, natural world, and always you are refreshed, stimulated, enlarged, by going there.

He is of course a distinguished naturalist, probably the most acute, broad-minded, and understanding observer of Nature living. And this, in an age of specialism, which loves to put men into pigeonholes and label them, has been a misfortune to the reading public, who seeing the label Naturalist, pass on, and take down the nearest novel. Hudson has indeed the gifts and knowledge of a Naturalist, but that is a mere fraction of his value and interest. A really great writer such as this is no more to be circumscribed by a single word than America by the part of it called New York. The expert knowledge, which Hudson has of Nature, gives to all his work backbone and surety of fiber, and to his sense of beauty an intimate actuality. But his real eminence and extraordinary attraction lie in his spirit and philosophy. We feel from his writings that he is nearer to Nature than other men, and yet more truly civilized. The competitive, towny culture, the queer up-to-date commercial knowingness with which we are so busy coating ourselves simply will not stick to him. A passage in his Hampshire Days describes him better than I can:

"The blue sky, the brown soil beneath, the grass, the trees, the animals, the wind, and rain, and stars are never strange to me; for I am in and of and am one with them; and my flesh and the soil are one, and the heat in my blood and in the sunshine are one, and the winds and the tempests and my passions are one. I feel the 'strangeness' only with regard to my fellow men, especially in towns, where they exist in conditions unnatural to me, but congenial to them.... In such moments we sometimes feel a kinship with, and are strangely drawn to, the dead, who were not as these; the long, long dead, the men who knew not life in towns, and felt no strangeness in sun and wind and rain."

This unspoiled unity with Nature pervades all his writings; they are remote from the fret and dust and pettiness of town life; they are large, direct, free. It is not quite simplicity, for the mind of this writer is subtle and fastidious, sensitive to each motion of natural and human life; but his sensitiveness is somehow different from, almost inimical to, that of us others, who sit indoors and dip our pens in shades of feeling. Hudson's fancy is akin to the flight of the birds that are his special loves—it never seems to have entered a house, but since birth to have been roaming the air, in rain and sun, or visiting the trees and the grass. I not only disbelieve utterly, but intensely dislike, the doctrine of metempsychosis, which, if I understand it aright, seems the negation of the creative impulse, an apotheosis of staleness— nothing quite new in the world, never anything quite new—not even the soul of a baby; and so I am not prepared to entertain the whim that a bird was one of his remote incarnations; still, in sweep of wing, quickness of eye, and natural sweet strength of song he is not unlike a super-bird—which is a horrid image. And that reminds me: This, after all, is a foreword to Green Mansions—the romance of the bird-girl Rima—a story actual yet fantastic, which immortalizes, I think, as passionate a love of all beautiful things as ever was in the heart of man.

Somewhere Hudson says: "The sense of the beautiful is God's best gift to the human soul."  So it is: and to pass that gift on to others, in such measure as herein is expressed, must surely have been happiness to him who wrote Green Mansions. In form and spirit the book is unique, a simple romantic narrative transmuted by sheer glow of beauty into a prose poem. Without ever departing from its quality of a tale, it symbolizes-the yearning of the human soul for the attainment of perfect love and beauty in this life—that impossible perfection which we must all learn to see fall from its high tree and be consumed in the flames, as was Rima the bird-girl, but whose fine white ashes we gather that they may be mingled at last with our own, when we too have been refined by the fire of death's resignation. The book is soaked through and through with a strange beauty. I will not go on singing its praises, or trying to make it understood, because I have other words to say of its author.

Do we realize how far our town life and culture have got away from things that really matter; how instead of making civilization our handmaid to freedom we have set her heel on our necks, and under it bite dust all the time?  Hudson, whether he knows it or not, is now the chief standard-bearer of another faith. Thus he spake in The Purple Land: "Ah, yes, we are all vainly seeking after happiness in the wrong way. It was with us once and ours, but we despised it, for it was only the old common happiness which Nature gives to all her children, and we went away from it in search of another grander kind of happiness which some dreamer—Bacon or another—assured us we should find. We had only to conquer Nature, find out her secrets, make her our obedient slave, then the Earth would be Eden, and every man Adam and every woman Eve. We are still marching bravely on, conquering Nature, but how weary and sad we are getting!  The old joy in life and gaiety of heart have vanished, though we do sometimes pause for a few moments in our long forced march to watch the labors of some pale mechanic, seeking after perpetual motion, and indulge in a little, dry, cackling laugh at his expense."  And again: "For here the religion that languishes in crowded cities or steals shamefaced to hide itself in dim churches flourishes greatly, filling the soul with a solemn joy. Face to face with Nature on the vast hills at eventide, who does not feel himself near to the Unseen?

 

"Out of his heart God shall not pass

His image stamped is on every grass."

 

All Hudson's books breathe this spirit of revolt against our new enslavement by towns and machinery, and are true oases in an age so dreadfully resigned to the "pale mechanic."

But Hudson is not, as Tolstoy was, a conscious prophet; his spirit is freer, more willful, whimsical—almost perverse—and far more steeped in love of beauty. If you called him a prophet he would stamp his foot at you—as he will at me if he reads these words; but his voice is prophetic, for all that, crying in a wilderness, out of which, at the call, will spring up roses here and there, and the sweet-smelling grass. I would that every man, woman, and child in England were made to read him; and I would that you in America would take him to heart. He is a tonic, a deep refreshing drink, with a strange and wonderful flavor; he is a mine of new interests, and ways of thought instinctively right. As a simple narrator he is well nigh unsurpassed; as a stylist he has few, if any, living equals. And in all his work there is an indefinable freedom from any thought of after- benefit- -even from the desire that we should read him. He puts down what he sees and feels, out of sheer love of the thing seen, and the emotion felt; the smell of the lamp has not touched a single page that he ever wrote. That alone is a marvel to us who know that to write well, even to write clearly, is a wound business, long to learn, hard to learn, and no gift of the angels. Style should not obtrude between a writer and his reader; it should be servant, not master. To use words so true and simple that they oppose no obstacle to the flow of thought and feeling from mind to mind, and yet by juxtaposition of word-sounds set up in the recipient continuing emotion or gratification—this is the essence of style; and Hudson's writing has pre-eminently this double quality. From almost any page of his books an example might be taken. Here is one no better than a thousand others, a description of two little girls on a beach:

 

"They were dressed in black frocks and scarlet blouses, which set off their beautiful small dark faces; their eyes sparkled like black diamonds, and their loose hair was a wonder to see, a black mist or cloud about their heads and necks composed of threads fine as gossamer, blacker than jet and shining like spun glass—hair that looked as if no comb or brush could ever tame its beautiful wildness. And in spirit they were what they seemed: such a wild, joyous, frolicsome spirit, with such grace and fleetness, one does not look for in human beings, but only in birds or in some small bird-like volatile mammal—a squirrel or a spider-monkey of the tropical forest, or the chinchilla of the desolate mountain slopes; the swiftest, wildest, loveliest, most airy, and most vocal of small beauties."  Or this, as the quintessence of a sly remark:

 

"After that Mantel got on to his horse and rode away. It was black and rainy, but he had never needed moon or lantern to find what he sought by night, whether his own house, or a fat cow—also his own, perhaps."  So one might go on quoting felicity forever from this writer. He seems to touch every string with fresh and uninked fingers; and the secret of his power lies, I suspect, in the fact that his words:

 

"Life being more than all else to me . . ."  are so utterly true.

 

I do not descant on his love for simple folk and simple things, his championship of the weak, and the revolt against the cagings and cruelties of life, whether to men or birds or beasts, that springs out of him as if against his will; because, having spoken of him as one with a vital philosophy or faith, I don't wish to draw red herrings across the main trail of his worth to the world. His work is a vision of natural beauty and of human life as it might be, quickened and sweetened by the sun and the wind and the rain, and by fellowship with all the other forms of life—the truest vision now being given to us, who are more in want of it than any generation has ever been. A very great writer; and—to my thinking—the most valuable our age possesses.

 

JOHN GALSWORTHY

September 1915  Manaton: Devon