Proserpine and Midas | Page 5

with her 'mamma':
I'll have my earl as well as she Or know the reason why.
And she wants to flaunt it accordingly.
Finally,
Fondness prevailed; mamma gave way; Kitty, at heart's desire, Obtained the chariot for a day, And set the world on fire.
Pandora, in Parnell's Hesiod or the Rise of Woman, is only a
'shining vengeance... A pleasing bosom-cheat, a specious ill'
sent by the gods upon earth to punish the race of Prometheus.
The most poetical fables of Greece are desecrated by Gay into mere miniatures for the decoration of his Fan.
Similar instances abound later on. When Armstrong brings in an apostrophe to the Naiads, it is in the course of a _Poetical Essay on the Art of Preserving Health_. And again, when Cowper stirs himself to intone an Ode to Apollo, it is in the same mock-heroic vein:
Patron of all those luckless brains, That to the wrong side leaning Indite much metre with much pains And little or no meaning...
Even in Gray's--'Pindaric Gray's'--treatment of classical themes, there is a sort of pervading ennui, or the forced appreciativeness of a gouty, disappointed man. The daughter of Jove to whom he dedicates his hymns too often is 'Adversity'. And classical reminiscences have, even with him, a dull musty tinge which recalls the antiquarian in his Cambridge college-rooms rather than the visitor to Florence and Rome. For one thing, his allusions are too many, and too transitory, to appear anything but artistic tricks and verse- making tools. The 'Aegean deep', and 'Delphi's steep', and 'Meander's amber waves', and the 'rosy-crowned Loves', are too cursorily summoned, and dismissed, to suggest that they have been brought in for their own sweet sakes.
It was thus with all the fine quintessences of ancient lore, with all the pearl-like accretions of the faiths and fancies of the old world: they were handled about freely as a kind of curious but not so very rare coins, which found no currency in the deeper thoughts of our modern humanity, and could therefore be used as a mere badge of the learning and taste of a literary 'coterie'.
The very names of the ancient gods and heroes were in fact assuming that abstract anaemic look which common nouns have in everyday language. Thus, when Garrick, in his verses _Upon a Lady's Embroidery_, mentions 'Arachne', it is obvious that he does not expect the reader to think of the daring challenger of Minerva's art, or the Princess of Lydia, but just of a plain spider. And again, when Falconer, in his early Monody on the death of the Prince of Wales, expresses a rhetorical wish
'to aid hoarse howling Boreas with his sighs,'
that particular son of Astraeus, whose love for the nymph Orithyia was long unsuccessful, because he could not 'sigh', is surely far from the poet's mind; and 'to swell the wind', or 'the gale', would have served his turn quite as well, though less 'elegantly'.
Even Gibbon, with all his partiality for whatever was pre- or post- Christian, had indeed no better word than 'elegant' for the ancient mythologies of Greece and Rome, and he surely reflected no particularly advanced opinion when he praised and damned, in one breath, 'the pleasant and absurd system of Paganism.' [Footnote: Essay on the Study of Literature, Section 56.] No wonder if in his days, and for a long time after, the passionate giants of the Ages of Fable had dwindled down to the pretty puppets with which the daughters of the gentry had to while away many a school hour.
But the days of this rhetorical--or satirical, didactic--or perfunctory, treatment of classical themes were doomed. It is the glory of Romanticism to have opened 'magic casements' not only on 'the foam of perilous seas' in the West, but also on
the chambers of the East, The chambers of the Sun, that now From ancient melody had ceased. [Footnote: Blake, Poetical Sketches, 1783.]
Romanticism, as a freshening up of all the sources of life, a general rejuvenescence of the soul, a ubiquitous visiting of the spirit of delight and wonder, could not confine itself to the fields of mediaeval romance. Even the records of the Greek and Roman thought assumed a new beauty; the classical sense was let free from its antiquarian trammels, and the perennial fanes resounded to the songs of a more impassioned worship.
The change, however, took some time. And it must be admitted that in England, especially, the Romantic movement was slow to go back to classical themes. Winckelmann and Goethe, and Chenier--the last, indeed, practically all unknown to his contemporaries--had long rediscovered Antiquity, and felt its pulse anew, and praised its enduring power, when English poetry had little, if anything, to show in answer to the plaintive invocation of Blake to the Ancient Muses.
The first generation of English Romantics either shunned the subject altogether, or simply echoed Blake's isolated