The Hammock Papers: Happy Birthday, Schoolcraft

28 March 2021

Happy Birthday, Schoolcraft

Henry Rowe Schoolcraft was born on this day in 1793.

In the fall of 1855, a small book containing "The Song of Hiawatha" was given to the public. A few weeks after its appearance, the statement was made by a writer in a Washington, D. C., newspaper that Longfellow had taken “the entire form, spirit, and many of the most striking incidents” from the Finnish Kalevala. For a while critics amused themselves with preferring charges of plagiarism against this latest production of the poet. Spurred on by hunger for publicity, Poe once had led such an attack viciously. Longfellow and his friends had no great trouble in refuting the disagreeable assertions. In his notes to the poem, Longfellow gave full credit to Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s writings as the source of practically all of his material. When Schoolcraft’s The Myth of Hiawatha appeared in 1856 the slanders were effectually scotched.

In 1899 Nathan Haskell Dole published a learned discussion of the relation of Hiawatha to the Kalevala, in which Longfellow was completely vindicated; but no one has ever adequately presented the important part played by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft in the creation of the great American epic.

Chase S. Osborn and Stellanova Osborn, from Schoolcraft, Longfellow, Hiawatha

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL