Proserpine and Midas | Page 5

real meaning.

When Dryden, for example, makes use of the legend of Midas, in his
Wife of Bath's Tale, he makes, not Midas's minister, but his queen, tell
the mighty secret--and thus secures another hit at woman's loquacity.
Prior's Female Phaeton is a younger sister, who, jealous of her elder's
success, thus pleads 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