I suppose one cannot at this day say anything new, from a literary point
of view, about those autochthonic bequests of Asia--the Hebrew Bible,
the mighty Hindu epics, and a hundred lesser but typical works; (not
now definitely including the Iliad--though that work was certainly
of Asiatic genesis, as Homer himself was--considerations which seem
curiously ignored.) But will there ever be a time or place--ever a
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? Could there be any more opportune suggestion, to
the current popular writer and reader of verse, what the office of
poet was in primeval 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 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.