Complete Prose Works: Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My FancyWhitman, Walt
History
Complete Prose Works: Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy
Whitman, Walt
American literature
[27] A: After the rest is satiated, all interest culminates in the field
of persons, and never flags there. Accordingly in this field have the
great poets and literatuses signally toil'd. They too, in all ages, all
lands, have been creators, fashioning, making types of men and women,
as Adam and Eve are made in the divine fable. Behold, shaped, bred by
orientalism, feudalism, through their long growth and culmination, and
breeding back in return--(when shall we have an equal series, typical of
democracy?)--behold, commencing in primal Asia, (apparently formulated,
in what beginning we know, in the gods of the mythologies, and coming
down thence,) a few samples out of the countless product, bequeath'd to
the moderns, bequeath'd to America as studies. For the men, Yudishtura,
Rama, Arjuna, Solomon, most of the Old and New Testament characters;
Achilles, Ulysses, Theseus, Prometheus, Hercules, Aeneas, Plutarch's
heroes; the Merlin of Celtic bards; the Cid, Arthur and his knights,
Siegfried and Hagen in the Nibelungen; Roland and Oliver; Roustam in
the Shah-Nemah; and so on to Milton's Satan, Cervantes' Don Quixote,
Shakspere's Hamlet, Richard II., Lear, Marc Antony, &c., and the modern
Faust. These, I say, are models, combined, adjusted to other standards
than America's, but of priceless value to her and hers.
Among women, the goddesses of the Egyptian, Indian and Greek
mythologies, certain Bible characters, especially the Holy Mother;
Cleopatra, Penelope; the portraits of Brunhelde and Chriemhilde in the
Nibelungen; Oriana, Una, &c.; the modern Consuelo, Walter Scott's Jeanie
and Effie Deans, &c., &c. (Yet woman portray'd or outlin'd at her best,
or as perfect human mother, does not hitherto, it seems to me, fully
appear in literature.)
[28] Note, to-day, an instructive, curious spectacle and conflict.
Science, (twin in its fields, of Democracy in its)--Science, testing
absolutely all thoughts, all works, has already burst well upon the
world--a sun, mounting, most illuminating, most glorious--surely never
again to set. But against it, deeply entrench'd, holding possession, yet
remains, (not only through the churches and schools, but by imaginative
literature, and unregenerate poetry,) the fossil theology of
the mythic-materialistic, superstitious, untaught and credulous,
fable-loving, primitive ages of humanity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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