with the walls and trees which speak of the past no less than the present, and make both full of images of greatness, this, in an inferior degree, belongs to every member of an ancient and celebrated place of education.' Finally, Arnold directed the enthusiasm thus gained from the past upon the immediate present. He writes to a friend: 'I cannot deny that you have an anxious duty— a duty which some might suppose was too heavy for your years. But it seems to me the nobler as well as the truer way of stating the case to say that it is the great privilege of this and other institutions to anticipate the common time of manhood; that by their whole training they fit the character for manly duties at an age when, under another system, such duties would be impracticable.' The classics, he thought, then, so far from abstracting the learner from the present, prepare him more speedily than any other system does for its service.

As we go farther in the nineteenth century, and especially as we come to our own times, we are forced to acknowledge that to many thinkers the classics are no longer an indispensable part of education. The causes of this attitude are not far to seek-romanticism, naturalism, and the breaking-down of authority of all kinds. Germany has contributed largely. Germany rediscovered Greek literature, and exterminated Latin. Germany has led the way to the scientific study of the classics, and garnered more results than any other nation. It contributed the philosophy of relativity which, joining forces with the doctrine of evolution, the product of English science, led to new methods and manifold results in the study of history. But an excessive scrutiny of origins has impaired the efficacy of the classics. The tendency of the historical spirit is to compel illustrious characters of the past to know their place, whereas the Middle Ages and the Renaissance summoned the ancients to transgress their periods-yes, to walk down the centuries and shake hands. A late mediaeval tapestry at Langeais sets forth a goodly troop of knights, all caparisoned cap-à-pie in the same manner; they are Godfrey of Bouillon, Julius Caesar, Samson, and some others. We shudder when we find the Byzantine chronicler Malalas putting Polybius before Herodotus, or John the Scot setting Martianus Capella in the times of Cicero, but are ourselves inclined to forget that, though history has its periods, the imagination has none. We should encourage it to glorious anachronisms, or rather hyperchronisms, for if it is chronologically fettered the classics become demodernized. A further tendency of historical analysis is to resolve great personalities and traditions into causes and

effects. An author is not regarded as an entity unless he is influencing somebody else; when the critics look at him, he disappears in a mist of sources. Let me not be misunderstood. I regard the critical method of the historian as indispensable; but this very method is imperfect if it does not reckon with ethical and imaginative values as well.

But to proceed no further with this arraignment of the age, let me conclude by referring to the hardest problem of all, which has been gradually accumulating for our generation, namely, the presence of various modern literatures of great power and beauty, which were only beginning to exist when the humanists based all teaching on the classics. May not the literature of any of the great nations of Europe serve the purpose as effectively? How can we neglect any of them, and how can we elect? Further, I would inquire, how have we teachers of the classics fulfilled our tasks? Have we always kept before us the true ideal of humanism? Have we made the sacred past living and contemporary, or have we banished our subject to a timeless district, illumined, not by the dry light of reason, which is a wholesome effluence, but by the dry darkness of the unprofitable? I raise these issues contentedly, and bequeath them to the other speakers at this meeting. With many startling leaps down the centuries, and, I fear, with many hasty generalizations, I have at least made clear that the true program of humanism, which is nothing but the ancient program revived, has always pointed men to the treasured ideals of the past, and inspired them to action in the present.

XV

MILTON'S USE OF CLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY1

BY CHARLES GROSVENOR OSGOOD

The importance of Greek and Roman mythology is proved by its unfailing vitality. After the visible forms of states and empires had passed away, the myths of the ancients survived with their politics and philosophy and poetry as a part of the heritage which the new peoples received from the old. This power of classical myths to survive is explained principally by two facts: first, they were the embodiment of the moral, religious, and artistic ideals of the Greeks and Romans; secondly, morality, religion, and art were serious and fundamental realities in ancient life.

These two facts explain also the kind of vitality by which the myths have survived. It consists not merely in the repetition of a tale through centuries, but also in the variation of its quality, and in its susceptibility to employment for various uses. The old mythology was a kind of plastic material which received through individuals a national impress. As the life of the Greeks became modified from century to century, so Greek mythology was similarly modified by the poets, teachers, philosophers, and artists who were the master-workmen of this people. The stories and conceptions of gods and heroes are strong, aspiring, or weak, as the people who invented and cherished them manifested the corresponding qualities. And when the Roman civilization adopted Greek culture, Greek mythology suffered modification, and became in some degree a reflex of the Roman life into which it had entered.

The poet who was religious, and hence peculiarly and continually sensitive to moral truth, found in existing mythology a partial expression of the truths dear to him, and in his poetic treatment added to the moral, religious, or imaginative value of the myth

[1 From The Classical Mythology of Milton's English Poems (pp. x-xxxii). Professor Osgood's excellent dissertation appeared as No. 8 in Yale Studies in English, edited by Albert S. Cook. The present extract is reprinted with the author's consent, slightly abridged both in the text and the footnotes. References from this to other parts of the dissertation have been omitted.-EDITOR.]

which he employed. Reverence as well as imagination characterizes such treatment. We feel it in the mythology of poets like Homer, Plato, and Virgil. Thus in the first book of the Iliad, where Chryses prayed for revenge upon Agamemnon, 'Phoebus Apollo heard him, and came down from the peaks of Olympus wroth at heart, bearing on his shoulders his bow and covered quiver. And the arrows clanged upon his shoulders in his wrath, as the god moved; and he descended like to night." This passage not only shows Homer's imagination in its vividness and dramatic power, but contains moral enthusiasm for divine justice, and reverence for the superior and majestic power of the god. But Homer's reverence had a lower object than that of either Plato or the Christian. His ideal of conduct, as represented by his heroes, and magnified in his divinities, was nourished by a smaller life and a lower conception of the universe than the Platonic or the Christian ideal. His greatest men and women are brave, dignified, and generous, sometimes even tender. Yet they treat their enemies with horrible cruelty, they violate our ideas of moral purity, and they exhibit lack of selfcontrol and fear of death. Already in the palmy days of Greek civilization Plato criticizes them for such shortcomings.3

The reverence of this poet-philosopher for mythology was not based upon a literal belief in the old religion. He appreciated the beauty of some of its myths, and saw that they were sufficiently plastic to receive his teaching. In his adaptation he has impressed them with the imagination, and with the enthusiasm and reverence for truth which are exhibited in his philosophy. Under the influence of his higher and larger ideals and conceptions, mythology underwent a sort of expansion. It was sublimated, rarefied, and projected into larger space. It received a nobler form than that which it possessed in Homer. At the same time, however, it assumed a new function; it became symbolic and almost allegorical. Thus in the Phaedrus, where Plato is discussing the upward flight of the perfect soul, he says: 'Now the divine is beauty, wisdom, goodness, and the like; and by these the wing of the soul is nourished, and grows apace; Zeus, the mighty lord holding the reins of a winged chariot, leads the way in heaven, ordering all and caring for all; and there follows him the heavenly array of gods and demi-gods, divided into eleven bands; for only Hestia is left at home in the house of heaven; but the rest of the twelve greater deities march in their appointed order. And they see in

2 Iliad 1. 45.

8 Republic 3. 386.

...

the interior of heaven many blessed sights; and there are ways to and fro, along which the happy gods are passing, each one fulfilling his own work; and any one may follow who pleases, for jealousy has no place in the heavenly choir. This is within the heaven. But when they go to feast and festival, then they move right up the steep ascent, and mount the top of the dome of heaven. 14 To appreciate more fully the difference between Homer and Plato, this passage should be compared with the famous feast of the gods in the first book of the Iliad, where jealous Hera stirs a quarrel with Zeus; but at his threats 'the ox-eyed queen was afraid, and sat in silence, curbing her heart; but throughout Zeus' palace the gods of heaven were troubled.' Then the drollery of Hephaestus made a truce, and 'laughter unquenchable arose amid the blessed gods to see Hephaestus bustling through the palace.'

An allegorical and naturalistic application of mythology was made by Plutarch. The attempt was afterwards made to identify many myths with early or sacred history through euhemeristic interpretation, or to discover in them an allegorical form of Christian and moral truth. Such uses of mythology find early precedent in a euhemerist like Diodorus, or a moralist like Plutarch. They were later practised by certain of the Fathers, such as Eusebius, and were resumed with great enthusiasm by scientific writers of the Renaissance, such as Bacon and Bochart.

In the times of Greek and Roman decadence, when faith in the old religion had died, leaving empty the hearts of men, and when morality was by many regarded as inconvenient and unnecessary, the treatment of a myth in art became correspondingly irreligious and non-moral. As a diverting tale it admitted of imaginative treatment only. A Horace or a Claudian made it serve as a dainty and effective ornament. Ovid clothed the old stories in new apparel and ornament, and, thus renovated, they gave the world fresh amusement; his importance to us as a mythologist consists much less in any moral or artistic excellence of his treatment than in his great accumulation of mythological material from sources many of which have long since disappeared.

Having thus considered the vitality of ancient myths as illustrated by their varying quality and the various ways in which they were applied, we may ask whether this vitality has failed at last, or whether it is so great that the myths may live with us a life in

♦ Phaedrus 246, 247. Compare also the use of mythology in the story of the journey of Er, Republic 10. 614-621.

5 Iliad 1. 493-600.