The Classic Myths in English Literature and in Art (2nd ed.) (1911): Based Originally on Bulfinch's "Age of Fable" (1855) — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
The Classic Myths in English Literature and in Art (2nd ed.) (1911): Based Originally on Bulfinch's "Age of Fable" (1855)
John Stuart Mill · en
Now, one evident means of tempering the consequence of this neglect
of the classics is the study of them through translations and
summaries. Such secondhand study must indeed be ever a makeshift; for
the literature of a people inheres in its language, and loses its
seeming and often its characteristic when caparisoned in the trappings
of another speech,--an utterance totally dissimilar, the outcome
of diverse conditions of physical environment, history, social and
intellectual tradition. But in dealing with the purely imaginative
products of antiquity, the inefficacy of translation may be somewhat
offset if those products be reproduced, so far as possible, not in the
prosaic but in the poetic atmosphere and in the imaginative garb of
art. For though the phenomena of plastic art are not the same in one
continent as in another, or from one century to the next, and though
the fashion of poetry itself varies from age to age and from clime
to clime, the genesis of imagination is universal, its products are
akin, and its process is continuous. For this reason the study of the
imaginative thought of the ancients through the artistic creations
of the moderns is commended to students and readers as feasible and
profitable.
The study of the classic myths stimulates to creative production,
prepares for the appreciation of poetry and other kinds of art, and
furnishes a clew to the spiritual development of the race.
1. Classic mythology has been for succeeding poetry, sculpture, and
painting, a treasure house replete with golden tales and glimmering
thoughts, passions in the rough and smooth, and fancies rich bejeweled.
Like Virgil's Shadows that flit by the Lethean stream until at beck
of Fate they revisit upper day and the ever-tranquil stars, these
ghosts of "far-off things and battles long ago," peopling the murmurous
glades of myth, await the artist who shall bestow on each his new and
predetermined form and restore them, purified and breathing of Elysian
air, to the world of life and ever-young mankind.
2. For the reader the study of mythology does, in this respect, as
much as for poet, sculptor, or painter. It assists him to thrid the
labyrinth of art, not merely with the clew of tradition, but with a
thread of surer knowledge whose surest strand is sympathy.