The Classic Myths in English Literature and in Art (2nd ed.) (1911)

The Classic Myths in English Literature and in Art (2nd ed.) (1911) - Based Originally on Bulfinch's "Age of Fable" (1855)

Our American educational methods too frequently seek to produce the effect of polish upon a kind of sandstone information that will not stand polishing. With such fatuity many of our teachers in the secondary schools exercise their pupils in the study of English masterpieces and in the critical estimate of sthetic qualities before acquainting them with the commonplace facts and fables that, transmitted through generations, are the material of much of our poetry because the material of daily converse, imagination, and thought. These commonplaces of tradition are to be found largely in the literature of mythology. Of course the evil would be neither so widespread nor so dangerous if more of the guardians and instructors of our youth were at home even among the Greek and Latin classics. But for various reasons,some valid, as, for instance, the importance of increased attention to the modern languages and the natural sciences; others worthless, as the so-called utilitarian protest against the cultivation of "dead" languages,for various reasons the study of the classics is at present considerably impaired. It is, therefore, incumbent upon our universities and schools, recognizing this fact and deploring it, to abate so far as possible the unfortunate consequences that proceed therefrom, until, by a readjustment of subjects of instruction and of the periods allotted them, the Greek and Latin classics shall be reinstated in their proper place as a means of discipline, a humanizing influence, the historic background against which our present appears. For, cut off from the intellectual and imaginative sources of Greece and Rome, the state and statesmanship, legislation and law, society and manners, philosophy, religion, literature, art, and even artistic appreciation, run readily shallow and soon dry. [Pg xxx] 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. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 46063
Author: Bulfinch, Thomas
Release Date: Jun 21, 2014
Format: eBook
Language: English

Contributors

Contributor (Author): Gayley, Charles Mills, 1858-1932