Sacramento daily record-union. [volume] (Sacramento [Calif.]) 1875-1891, 1883-03-03
SUNDAY EASY CHAIR.
WALT WHITMAN UPON TIE BIBLE
as POETRY.
Current Religious Observation-Disclosures Of
True Manhood-New Method OF In
quiry-society Of Friends-Itc.

Certainly Walt Whitman the poet, some
of whose works have been placed upon the
rack of seyere criticism, if not seclnsion,
from the shelves of the Sacramento Free
Library, because of their trespassing upon
the debatable grounds OF immortality, can.
not be said to be so religiously inclined as
to have blind reverence for the Bible, and
hence the recent article which appears in
the Washington Critic from his pen, upon
''The Bible as Poetry" must be regarded
as his mature criticism in the broad field
of poetic art. He says
Ii the time ever comes when iconoclasm
| does its EXTREMIST in one direction against
| this Book, the collection must still survive
in another, and dominate just as much as
hitherto, or more than hitherto, through its
divine and primal poetic structure. To me,
that ia the living and definite element -prin-
ciple of the work, evolving everything else.
Then the continuity the Oldest and newest
| Asiatic utterance and character, and all be.
tween, holding together, like the apparition
of the sky, and coming TO us the same.
Even to our nineteenth century here are
| the fountain head Of song.
suppose one cannot at this day say any
thing new, from literary point of view,
about those autoch. thonic requests of Asia
the Hebrew Bible, the mighty Hindu epics,
and hundred lesser but typical works ;
(not now definitely including the Iliad-
though that work was certainly of Asiastio
genesis, as Homer himself was-considera-
ton which seem curiously ignored). But
viii there ever be time or place-ever
student, however modern, of the grand art,
to whom those compositions will not afford
profounder lessons than all else OF their
kind in the garnerage of the past? Gould
there be any mere opportune suggestion, to
the current popular writer and reader OF
verse, what the office of poet was in prim-
eval times-and is yet capable of being
anew, adjusted entirely to the modern?
All the poems of Orientalism, with the
Old and New Testaments at the center, tend
to deep and wide Il don't know 5nt the
deepest and widest) psychological develop.
ment-with little, or nothing at all, of the
mere esthetic, the principal verse require
ment of our day. Very late, but unerring-
ly, comes to every capable student the per-
ception that it is not in beauty, it is not in
art, it is not even in science, that the pro-
foundest laws OF the case have their eternal
sway and outcropping.
In his discourse on Hebrew Poets" De
Sofa Mendes said "The fundamental fea-
ture of Judaism, of the Hebrew nationali-
ty, was religion its poetry was naturally
religious. It's subjects. God and Provi-
dence, the covenants with Israel, God in
nature and as revealed, God the Creator
and Governor, nature in her majesty and
beauty, inspired hymns and odes to ma
lures God. And then the checkered his
tory of the nation furnished illusions, Illus
trations and subjects for epic display-the
glory of the sanctuary, the offerings, the
splendid ritual, the Holy City, and loved
Palestine with its pleasant valleys and wild
tracts" Dr. Meudes said "rhyming was
not characteristic of Hebrew poetry at all.
Meter was not a necessary mark of poetry.
Great poets discarded it the early Jewish
poets knew it not"
Compared with the famed epicso of Greece,
and lesser ones since, the spinal supports of
The Bible are simple and meager. All its
history, biography, narratives, etc, are as
beads, strung on and indicating the eternal
thread of the Deiic purpose and power.
Yet with only deepest faith for impetus,
and such Deiic purpose for palpable or i'm
pllpable theme, it often transcends the
master. pieces of Hellas, and all master
pieces. Tbs metaphors daring beyond ac-
count, the lawless soul, extravagsnt by our
standards, the glow of love and friendship,
the fervent kiss-nothing in argument or
logic, but unsurpassed in proverbs, in relig-
ious ecstacy, In suggestions of common
mortality and death, mans great equalizer
the spirit every thing, the ceremonies snd
forms of the churches nothing, faith limit
lesss, its immense sensuousness immensely
spiritual an incredible, all-iuclusive non-
worldliness aad dew. scented illiterscy 1.-THE
antipodes of our nineteenth century bust
ness absorption and morbid refinement)-
no hair-splitting doubts, no sickly sulking
| and shifting, no Hamlet, no Adonis, F"
no 90 Thanatopsis, no "In Memorism.
The eliminated proof of the poetry of a
country is the quality of its personnel,
which, in any race, can never be really su.
| perior without superior poems. The finest
blending of individuality with uniyersality
| (ia my opinion nothing out of the galaxies
of the Had, or Shakespeare's heroes, or
from the Tennys0nian "Idyls, SO lofty,
devoted and star like) typifed in the songs
! of those old Asiatic lands. Men and WON.
en- as great columnar trees. Nowhere else
| the abnegation Of self-towering in such
quaint sublimity nowhere else the simplest
human emotions conqucring the gods of the
/ heaven, and fate itself. Crhe episode, for
instance, toward the close OF the "Mahab-
karat" journey of the wife Savitri
with the god of death, Yama.
81 One terrible to see-blood.rei his garb,
| His body huge and dark, bloodshot his eyes,
Which famed like suns beneath his turban cloth,
Armed was he with q noose,"
who carries off the soul of the dead hus-
band, the wife tenaciously following. and
by the resistless charm of perfect poetic
recitation Eventually redeeming her cap.
tive mate
remember how enthusiastically VIM.
Fl. Seward, in ais last days, once expatiated
on these themes, from his travels ia Turk.
ey, Egypt and Asia Minor, finding the old.
est Biblical narratives exactly illustrated
there to-day with apparently no break or
change along three thousand years-the
yelled woman, the costumes, the gravity
and simplicity, all the manners lust the
same. The veteran Trelawney said he
found the only real nohleman of the world
in good average specimen of the mid aged
or elderly Oriental. In the East ths grand
| figure, always leading, is the old man, ma
lestic, with flowing beard, paternal, etc.
la Europe and America, it is as we know.
the young fellow-in novels handsome
and interesting hero, more or less juvenile
in operas tenor with blooming cheeks.
black mustsche. superficial animation, ami
! ndr M Il