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Updated: May 15, 2025
While the Grecian and Roman myths are made familiar by our school-books, it is to be regretted that the wild and glorious mythic lore of our ancient kindred is neglected. To that you must go, if you would learn whence came "the German's inward sight, And slow-sure Britain's secular might,"
The genius of the Epic soars high above such myths as those about Pytho, Typhaon, and the Apollo who is alternately a dolphin and a meteor: soars high above pedantry and bad etymology. In the Epics we breathe a purer air. Descending, as it did, from the mythology of savages, the mythic store of Greece was rich in legends such as we find among the lowest races.
I made my first acquaintance with the limelit humanity that, magnificent in its crimes and in its virtues, sins or suffers in false eyebrows or white muslin to the sound of soft music. Here I met that strange creation, the villain a being as mythic, meseems, as the centaur, and, like it, more beast than man.
The young have been taught to admire the laurels of Parnassus, but only after they have been clipped and pollarded like a Dutch shrubbery. The roots which connect them with mythic antiquity, and the fresh leaves and flowers of the growing present, have been generally cut off with care, and the middle part only has been allowed to be used too often, of course, a sufficiently tough and dry stem.
Then follows Charlemagne putative founder, more probably first restorer, of the cathedral in his most mythic and heroic aspect, fresh out of the Chanson de Roland, while Roland and Oliver keep guard on each side of the porch, the latter bearing a mace with a ball and chain, the former his famous sword Durindal, the stone counterpart of the weapon preserved for nearly a thousand years in the monastery of Roncesvalles.
"It is necessary that the mythic form be fashioned before one may pour into it, in a more or less fluid state, the historic metal." Imagination had created a solar mythology long before it could be incarnated by the Greeks in Hercules and his exploits.
For example, we have in this nineteenth century the patriarchal age of the world still surviving in the desert tents of the Arab, while the mythic, anthropomorphic period is still extant in Persia, China, and India, and even among the nations of the West, in the rustic nooks and corners of the Roman Catholic countries of Europe.
Unless in the case of a few mythic figures connected with the religion of the country, there is nothing in the Assyrian bas-reliefs which is not imitated from nature. The imitation is always laborious, and often most accurate and exact. The laws of representation, as we understand them, are sometimes departed from, but it is always to impress the spectator with ideas in accordance with truth.
Paul sends greetings from the Christians of Corinth, Pallas, who never deigned to speak to his own slaves, but gave all his commands by signs, and who actually condescended to receive the thanks of the Senate, because he, the descendant of Etruscan kings, yet condescended to serve the Emperor and the Commonwealth; a preposterous and outrageous compliment, which appears to have been solely due to the fact of his name being identical with that of Virgil's young hero, the son of the mythic Evander!
About their camp fires scattered in forest glades by brooks and lakes, they assemble to dance and sing in honor of their gods wonderful mythic animals, for they hold as divine the ancient of bears, the eagle of the lost centuries, the rattlesnake of primeval times, and a host of other zoic deities.
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