Complete Prose Works

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All the poems of Orientalism, with the Old and New Testaments at the
centre, tend to deep and wide, (I don't know but the deepest and
widest,) psychological development--with little, or nothing at all, of
the mere esthetic, the principal verse-requirement of our day. Very
late, but unerringly, comes to every capable student the perception
that it is not in beauty, it is not in art, it is not even in science,
that the profoundest laws of the case have their eternal sway and
outcropping.

In his discourse on "Hebrew Poets" De Sola Mendes said: "The
fundamental feature of Judaism, of the Hebrew nationality, was
religion; its poetry was naturally religious. Its subjects, God and
Providence, the covenants with Israel, God in Nature, and as reveal'd,
God the Creator and Governor, Nature in her majesty and beauty,
inspired hymns and odes to Nature's God. And then the checker'd
history of the nation furnish'd allusions, illustrations, and subjects
for epic display--the glory of the sanctuary, the offerings, the
splendid ritual, the Holy City, and lov'd Palestine with its pleasant
valleys and wild tracts." Dr. Mendes said "that rhyming was not a
characteristic of Hebrew poetry at all. Metre was not a necessary mark
of poetry. Great poets discarded it; the early Jewish poets knew it
not." Compared with the famed epics of Greece, and lesser ones since,
the spinal supports of the Bible are simple and meagre. All its
history, biography, narratives, &c., are as beads, strung on and
indicating the eternal thread of the Deific purpose and power. Yet
with only deepest faith for impetus, and such Deific purpose for
palpable or impalpable theme, it often transcends the masterpieces of
Hellas, and all masterpieces.

The metaphors daring beyond account, the lawless soul, extravagant
by our standards, the glow of love and friendship, the fervent
kiss--nothing in argument or logic, but unsurpass'd in proverbs, in
religious ecstasy, in suggestions of common mortality and death, man's
great equalizers--the spirit everything, the ceremonies and forms
of the churches nothing, faith limitless, its immense sensuousness
immensely spiritual--an incredible, all-inclusive non-worldliness
and dew-scented illiteracy (the antipodes of our Nineteenth Century
business absorption and morbid refinement)--no hair-splitting doubts,
no sickly sulking and sniffling, no "Hamlet," no "Adonais," no
"Thanatopsis," no "In Memoriam."

The culminated proof of the poetry of a country is the quality of its
personnel, which, in any race, can never be really superior without
superior poems. The finest blending of individuality with universality
(in my opinion nothing out of the galaxies of the "Iliad," or
Shakspere's heroes, or from the Tennysonian "Idylls," so lofty,
devoted and starlike,) typified in the songs of those old Asiatic
lands. Men and women as great columnar trees. Nowhere else the
abnegation of self towering in such quaint sublimity; nowhere else
the simplest human emotions conquering the gods of heaven, and
fate itself. (The episode, for instance, toward the close of the
"Mahabharata"--the journey of the wife Savitri with the god of death,
Yama,

"One terrible to see--blood-red his garb,
His body huge and dark, bloodshot his eyes,
Which flamed like suns beneath his turban cloth,
Arm'd was he with a noose,"

who carries off the soul of the dead husband, the wife tenaciously
following, and--by the resistless charm of perfect poetic
recitation!-- eventually redeeming her captive mate.)

I remember how enthusiastically William H. Seward, in his last days,
once expatiated on these themes, from his travels in Turkey, Egypt,
and Asia Minor, finding the oldest Biblical narratives exactly
illustrated there to-day with apparently no break or change along
three thousand years--the veil'd women, the costumes, the gravity and
simplicity, all the manners just the same. The veteran Trelawney said
he found the only real _nobleman_ of the world in a good average
specimen of the mid-aged or elderly Oriental. In the East the grand
figure, always leading, is the _old man_, majestic, with flowing
beard, paternal, &c. In Europe and America, it is, as we know, the
young fellow--in novels, a handsome and interesting hero, more or less
juvenile--in operas, a tenor with blooming cheeks, black mustache,
superficial animation, and perhaps good lungs, but no more depth than
skim-milk. But reading folks probably get their information of those
Bible areas and current peoples, as depicted in print by English and
French cads, the most shallow, impudent, supercilious brood on earth.

I have said nothing yet of the cumulus of associations (perfectly
legitimate parts of its influence, and finally in many respects the
dominant parts,) of the Bible as a poetic entity, and of every portion
of it. Not the old edifice only--the congeries also of events and
struggles and surroundings, of which it has been the scene and
motive--even the horrors, dreads, deaths. How many ages and
generations have brooded and wept and agonized over this book!
What untellable joys and ecstasies--what support to martyrs at the
stake--from it. (No really great song can ever attain full purport
till long after the death of its singer--till it has accrued and
incorporated the many passions, many joys and sorrows, it has
itself arous'd.) To what myriads has it been the shore and rock of
safety--the refuge from driving tempest and wreck! Translated in all
languages, how it has united this diverse world! Of civilized lands
to-day, whose of our retrospects has it not interwoven and link'd
and permeated? Not only does it bring us what is clasp'd within its
covers; nay, that is the least of what it brings. Of its thousands,
there is not a verse, not a word, but is thick-studded with human
emotions, successions of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, of
our own antecedents, inseparable from that background of us, on which,
phantasmal as it is, all that we are to-day inevitably depends--our
ancestry, our past.

Strange, but true, that the principal factor in cohering the nations,
eras and paradoxes of the globe, by giving them a common platform
of two or three great ideas, a commonalty of origin, and projecting
kosmic brotherhood, the dream of all hope, all time--that the long
trains gestations, attempts and failures, resulting in the New World,
and in modern solidarity and politics--are to be identified and
resolv'd back into a collection of old poetic lore, which, more than
any one thing else, has been the axis of civilization and history
through thousands of years--and except for which this America of ours,
with its polity and essentials, could not now be existing.

No true bard will ever contravene the Bible. If the time ever comes
when iconoclasm does its extremest in one direction against the Books
of the Bible in its present form, 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 is the
living and definite element-principle of the work, evolving everything
else. Then the continuity; the oldest and newest Asiatic utterance and
character, and all between, holding together, like the apparition of
the sky, and coming to us the same. Even to our Nineteenth Century
here are the fountain heads of song.

FATHER TAYLOR (AND ORATORY)

I have never heard but one essentially perfect orator--one who
satisfied those depths of the emotional nature that in most cases go
through life quite untouch'd, unfed--who held every hearer by spells
which no conventionalist, high or low--nor any pride or composure, nor
resistance of intellect--could stand against for ten minutes.

And by the way, is it not strange, of this first-class genius in
the rarest and most profound of humanity's arts, that it will be
necessary, (so nearly forgotten and rubb'd out is his name by the
rushing whirl of the last twenty-five years,) to first inform current
readers that he was an orthodox minister, of no particular celebrity,
who during a long life preach'd especially to Yankee sailors in an old
fourth-class church down by the wharves in Boston--had practically
been a seafaring man through his earlier years--and died April 6,
1871, "just as the tide turn'd, going out with the ebb as an old salt
should"? His name is now comparatively unknown, outside of Boston--and
even there, (though Dickens, Mr. Jameson, Dr. Bartol and Bishop Haven
have commemorated him,) is mostly but a reminiscence.

During my visits to "the Hub," in 1859 and '60 I several times saw and
heard Father Taylor. In the spring or autumn, quiet Sunday forenoons,
I liked to go down early to the quaint ship-cabin-looking church where
the old man minister'd--to enter and leisurely scan the building,
the low ceiling, everything strongly timber'd (polish'd and rubb'd
apparently,) the dark rich colors, the gallery, all in half-light--and
smell the aroma of old wood--to watch the auditors, sailors, mates,
"matlows," officers, singly or in groups, as they came in--their
physiognomies, forms, dress, gait, as they walk'd along the
aisles--their postures, seating themselves in the rude, roomy,
undoor'd, uncushion'd pews--and the evident effect upon them of the
place, occasion, and atmosphere.

The pulpit, rising ten or twelve feet high, against the rear wall, was
back' d by a significant mural painting, in oil--showing out its bold
lines and strong hues through the subdued light of the building--of a
stormy sea, the waves high-rolling, and amid them an old-style ship,
all bent over, driving through the gale, and in great peril--a vivid
and effectual piece of limning, not meant for the criticism of artists
(though I think it had merit even from that standpoint,) but for its
effect upon the congregation, and what it would convey to them.

Father Taylor was a moderate-sized man, indeed almost small, (reminded
me of old Booth, the great actor, and my favorite of those and
preceding days,) well advanced in years, but alert, with mild blue or
gray eyes, and good presence and voice. Soon as he open'd his mouth
I ceas'd to pay any attention to church or audience, or pictures or
lights and shades; a far more potent charm entirely sway'd me. In the
course of the sermon, (there was no sign of any MS., or reading from
notes,) some of the parts would be in the highest degree majestic and
picturesque. Colloquial in a severe sense, it often lean'd to Biblical
and Oriental forms. Especially were all allusions to ships and the
ocean and sailors' lives, of unrival'd power and life-likeness.

Sometimes there were passages of fine language and composition, even
from the purist's point of view. A few arguments, and of the best, but
always brief and simple. One realized what grip there might have been
in such words-of-mouth talk as that of Socrates and Epictetus. In
the main, I should say, of any of these discourses, that the old
Demosthenean rule and requirement of "action, action, action," first
in its inward and then (very moderate and restrain'd) its outward
sense, was the quality that had leading fulfilment.

I remember I felt the deepest impression from the old man's prayers,
which invariably affected me to tears. Never, on similar or any
other occasions, have I heard such impassion'd pleading--such
human-harassing reproach (like Hamlet to his mother, in the
closet)--such probing to the very depths of that latent conscience and
remorse which probably lie somewhere in the background of every life,
every soul. For when Father Taylor preach'd or pray'd, the rhetoric
and art, the mere words, (which usually play such a big part) seem'd
altogether to disappear, and the _live feeling_ advanced upon you and
seiz'd you with a power before unknown. Everybody felt this marvellous
and awful influence. One young sailor, a Rhode Islander, (who came
every Sunday, and I got acquainted with, and talk'd to once or twice
as we went away,) told me, "that must be the Holy Ghost we read of in
the Testament."

I should be at a loss to make any comparison with other preachers or
public speakers. When a child I had heard Elias Hicks--and Father
Taylor (though so different in personal appearance, for Elias was of
tall and most shapely form, with black eyes that blazed at times
like meteors,) always reminded me of him. Both had the same inner,
apparently inexhaustible, fund of latent volcanic passion--the same
tenderness, blended with a curious remorseless firmness, as of some
surgeon operating on a belov'd patient. Hearing such men sends to the
winds all the books, and formulas, and polish'd speaking, and rules of
oratory.

Talking of oratory, why is it that the unsophisticated practices often
strike deeper than the train'd ones? Why do our experiences perhaps
of some local country exhorter--or often in the West or South at
political meetings--bring the most definite results? In my time I have
heard Webster, Clay, Edward Everett, Phillips, and such _celebres_
yet I recall the minor but life-eloquence of men like John P. Hale,
Cassius Clay, and one or two of the old abolition "fanatics" ahead of
all those stereotyped fames. Is not--I sometimes question--the first,
last, and most important quality of all, in training for a "finish'd
speaker," generally unsought, unreck'd of, both by teacher and pupil?
Though may-be it cannot be taught, anyhow. At any rate, we need to
clearly understand the distinction between oratory and elocution.
Under the latter art, including some of high order, there is indeed no
scarcity in the United States, preachers, lawyers, actors, lecturers,
&c. With all, there seem to be few real orators--almost none.

I repeat, and would dwell upon it (more as suggestion than mere
fact)--among all the brilliant lights of bar or stage I have heard in
my time (for years in New York and other cities I haunted the courts
to witness notable trials, and have heard all the famous actors and
actresses that have been in America the past fifty years) though I
recall marvellous effects from one or other of them, I never had
anything in the way of vocal utterance to shake me through and
through, and become fix'd, with its accompaniments, in my memory, like
those prayers and sermons--like Father Taylor's personal electricity
and the whole scene there--the prone ship in the gale, and dashing
wave and foam for background--in the little old sea-church in Boston,
those summer Sundays just before the secession war broke out.

THE SPANISH ELEMENT IN OUR NATIONALITY

[Our friends at Santa Fe, New Mexico, have just finish'd their
long-drawn-out anniversary of the 333d year of the settlement of their
city by the Spanish. The good, gray Walt Whitman was asked to write
them a poem in commemoration. Instead he wrote them a letter as
follows:--_Philadelphia Press_, August 5, 1883.]

CAMDEN, NEW JERSEY, _July 20, 1883_.

_To Messrs. Griffin, Martinez, Prince, and other Gentlemen at Santa
Fe_:

DEAR SIRS:--Your kind invitation to visit you and deliver a poem for
the 333d Anniversary of founding Santa Fe has reach'd me so late that
I have to decline, with sincere regret. But I will say a few words
offhand.

We Americans have yet to really learn our own antecedents, and sort
them, to unify them. They will be found ampler than has been supposed,
and in widely different sources. Thus far, impress'd by New England
writers and schoolmasters, we tacitly abandon ourselves to the notion
that our United States have been fashion'd from the British Islands
only, and essentially form a second England only--which is a
very great mistake. Many leading traits for our future national
personality, and some of the best ones, will certainly prove to have
originated from other than British stock. As it is, the British and
German, valuable as they are in the concrete, already threaten excess.
Or rather, I should say, they have certainly reach'd that excess.
To-day, something outside of them, and to counterbalance them, is
seriously needed.

The seething materialistic and business vortices of the United States,
in their present devouring relations, controlling and belittling
everything else, are, in my opinion, but a vast and indispensable
stage in the new world's development, and are certainly to be follow'd
by something entirely different--at least by immense modifications.
Character, literature, a society worthy the name, are yet to be
establish'd, through a nationality of noblest spiritual, heroic
and democratic attributes--not one of which at present definitely
exists--entirely different from the past, though unerringly founded on
it, and to justify it.

To that composite American identity of the future, Spanish character
will supply some of the most needed parts. No stock shows a grander
historic retrospect--grander in religiousness and loyalty, or for
patriotism, courage, decorum, gravity and honor. (It is time to
dismiss utterly the illusion-compound, half raw-head-and-bloody-bones
and half Mysteries-of-Udolpho, inherited from the English writers
of the past 200 years. It is time to realize--for it is certainly
true--that there will not be found any more cruelty, tyranny,
superstition, &c., in the _resume_ of past Spanish history than in the
corresponding _resume_ of Anglo-Norman history. Nay, I think there
will not be found so much.)

Then another point, relating to American ethnology, past and to come,
I will here touch upon at a venture. As to our aboriginal or Indian
population--the Aztec in the South, and many a tribe in the North and
West--I know it seems to be agreed that they must gradually dwindle
as time rolls on, and in a few generations more leave only a
reminiscence, a blank. But I am not at all clear about that. As
America, from its many far-back sources and current supplies,
develops, adapts, entwines, faithfully identifies its own--are we to
see it cheerfully accepting and using all the contributions of foreign
lands from the whole outside globe--and then rejecting the only ones
distinctively its own--the autochthonic ones?

As to the Spanish stock of our Southwest, it is certain to me that we
do not begin to appreciate the splendor and sterling value of its
race element. Who knows but that element, like the course of some
subterranean river, dipping invisibly for a hundred or two years, is
now to emerge in broadest flow and permanent action?

If I might assume to do so, I would like to send you the most cordial,
heartfelt congratulations of your American fellow-countrymen here.
You have more friends in the Northern and Atlantic regions than you
suppose, and they are deeply interested in the development of the
great Southwestern interior, and in what your festival would arouse to
public attention.

Very respectfully, &c.,

WALT WHITMAN.

WHAT LURKS BEHIND SHAKSPERE'S HISTORICAL PLAYS

We all know how much _mythus_ there is in the Shakspere question as it
stands to-day. Beneath a few foundations of proved facts are certainly
engulf d far more dim and elusive ones, of deepest importance--
tantalizing and half suspected--suggesting explanations that one dare
not put in plain statement. But coming at once to the point, the
English historical plays are to me not only the most eminent as
dramatic performances (my maturest judgment confirming the impressions
of my early years, that the distinctiveness and glory of the Poet
reside not in his vaunted dramas of the passions, but those founded on
the contests of English dynasties, and the French wars,) but form, as
we get it all, the chief in a complexity of puzzles. Conceiv'd out
of the fullest heat and pulse of European feudalism--personifying in
unparallel'd ways the mediaeval aristocracy, its towering spirit of
ruthless and gigantic caste, with its own peculiar air and arrogance
(no mere imitation)--only one of the "wolfish earls" so plenteous in
the plays themselves, or some born descendant and knower, might seem
to be the true author of those amazing works--works in some respects
greater than anything else in recorded literature.

The start and germ-stock of the pieces on which the present
speculation is founded are undoubtedly (with, at the outset, no small
amount of bungling work) in "Henry VI." It is plain to me that
as profound and forecasting a brain and pen as ever appear'd in
literature, after floundering somewhat in the first part of that
trilogy--or perhaps draughting it more or less experimentally or by
accident--afterward developed and defined his plan in the Second and
Third Parts, and from time to time, thenceforward, systematically
enlarged it to majestic and mature proportions in "Richard II,"
"Richard III," "King John," "Henry IV," "Henry V," and even in
"Macbeth," "Coriolanus" and "Lear." For it is impossible to grasp the
whole cluster of those plays, however wide the intervals and different
circumstances of their composition, without thinking of them as, in a
free sense, the result of an _essentially controling plan_. 'What was
that plan? Or, rather, what was veil'd behind it?--for to me there was
certainly something so veil'd. Even the episodes of Cade, Joan of Arc,
and the like (which sometimes seem to me like interpolations allow'd,)
may be meant to foil the possible sleuth, and throw any too 'cute
pursuer off the scent. In the whole matter I should specially dwell
on, and make much of, that inexplicable element of every highest
poetic nature which causes it to cover up and involve its real purpose
and meanings in folded removes and far recesses. Of this trait--hiding
the nest where common seekers may never find it--the Shaksperean works
afford the most numerous and mark'd illustrations known to me. I would
even call that trait the leading one through the whole of those works.

All the foregoing to premise a brief statement of how and where I get
my new light on Shakspere. Speaking of the special English plays, my
friend William O'Connor says:

They seem simply and rudely historical in their motive, as aiming
to give in the rough a tableau of warring dynasties,--and carry to
me a lurking sense of being in aid of some ulterior design, probably
well enough understood in that age, which perhaps time and criticism
will reveal.... Their atmosphere is one of barbarous and tumultuous
gloom,--they do not make us love the times they limn,... and it is
impossible to believe that the greatest of the Elizabethan men could
have sought to indoctrinate the age with the love of feudalism which
his own drama in its entirety, if the view taken of it herein be true,
certainly and subtly saps and mines.

Reading the just-specified play in the light of Mr. O'Connor's
suggestion, I defy any one to escape such new and deep utterance-
meanings, like magic ink, warm' d by the fire, and previously invisible.
Will it not indeed be strange if the author of "Othello" and "Hamlet"
is destin'd to live in America, in a generation or two, less as the
cunning draughtsman of the passions, and more as putting on record the
first full expose--and by far the most vivid one, immeasurably ahead of
doctrinaires and economists--of the political theory and results, or the
reason-why and necessity for them which America has come on earth to
abnegate and replace?

The summary of my suggestion would be, therefore, that while the more
the rich and tangled jungle of the Shaksperean area is travers'd and
studied, and the more baffled and mix'd, as so far appears, becomes
the exploring student (who at last surmises everything, and remains
certain of nothing,) it is possible a future age of criticism, diving
deeper, mapping the land and lines freer, completer than hitherto, may
discover in the plays named the scientific (Baconian?) inauguration
of modern democracy--furnishing realistic and first-class artistic
portraitures of the mediaeval world, the feudal personalities,
institutes, in their morbid accumulations, deposits, upon politics and
sociology,--may penetrate to that hard-pan, far down and back of the
ostent of to-day, on which (and on which only) the progressism of the
last two centuries has built this Democracy which now hold's secure
lodgment over the whole civilized world.

Whether such was the unconscious, or (as I think likely) the more
or less conscious, purpose of him who fashion'd those marvellous
architectonics, is a secondary question.

A THOUGHT ON SHAKSPERE

The most distinctive poems--the most permanently rooted and with
heartiest reason for being--the copious cycle of Arthurian legends, or
the almost equally copious Charlemagne cycle, or the poems of the Cid,
or Scandinavian Eddas, or Nibelungen, or Chaucer, or Spenser, or
_bona fide_ Ossian, or Inferno--probably had their rise in the great
historic perturbations, which they came in to sum up and confirm,
indirectly embodying results to date. Then however precious to
"culture," the grandest of those poems, it may be said, preserve and
typify results offensive to the modern spirit, and long past away. To
state it briefly, and taking the strongest examples, in Homer
lives the ruthless military prowess of Greece, and of its special
god-descended dynastic houses; in Shakspere the dragon-rancors and
stormy feudal Splendor of mediaeval caste.