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
Mythological and classical geography should not be neglected. The maps
accompanying this volume will be serviceable; but there should be
in the classroom one of Kiepert's maps of the World as Known to the
Ancients (Orbis Veteribus Notus), or maps of Ancient Italy, Greece,
and Asia Minor. The teacher will find the International Atlas (G.
P. Putnam's Sons, New York), A. Keith Johnston's School and College
Atlas of Ancient Geography, or the new edition of the same by James
Cranstoun, issued as Ginn and Company's Classical Atlas, indispensable
in the prosecution of general reading.
When it is the intention to study, in connection with the book,
an Homeric epic or a portion of it, the teacher should first make
sure that the class has an adequate preliminary training in general
mythology (such, for instance, as may be provided by the first
twenty-one chapters); he should then outline rapidly and entertainingly
the epic as a whole, emphasizing its position in the literature of the
world and its relation to the world of its own times, before proceeding
to read it in detail with the class. Excellent suggestions as to this
method of study are offered in the Introduction to Maxwell & Chubb's
Pope's Homer's Iliad, Books I, VI, XXII, and XXIV (Longmans), and in
the Introduction to the Riverside Edition of the Odyssey: Ulysses among
the Phæacians (Houghton Mifflin Company).
The more important myths and the best illustrative poems should provide
not only nutriment for thought, but material for memory. Our youth in
the push for hasty achievement bolt their meals; they masticate little,
swallow everything, digest nothing,--and having agonized, forget. If
fewer things were dispatched, especially in the study of literature,
and if more were intrusted to the memory, there would be something to
assimilate and time to assimilate it; there would be less dyspepsia and
more muscle. Teachers and parents are over-considerate, nowadays, of
the memory in children: they approach it gingerly; they have feared so
much to wring its withers that in most children the memory has grown
too soft for saddling. In our apprehension lest pupils may turn out
parrots, we have too often turned them out loons. It is better that a
few of the facts in their heads be wrong than that no facts be there
at all. With all our study of children and our gabble about methods
of teaching them, while we insist, properly enough, that youth is the
seedtime of observation, we seem to have forgotten that it is also the
harvest-time of memory. It is easy for children to remember what they
learn, it is a delight for them to commit to memory; we act criminally
when we send them forth with hardly a fact or a date or a glorious
verse in the memory of one out of ten of them. Such, unfortunately,
is the case in many of our schools; and such was not the case in the
day of our fathers. Pupils should be encouraged to recite _memoriter_
the best poems and verses that accompany the myths here given; and