The Golden Verses of Pythagoras — with commentary (1917)
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Shakespeare with the creative genius with which nature had endowed him, would have borne dramatic art to its perfection in these modem times, if circiumstances had been as favourable to him as they were adverse. Emulator of ^schylus, he might have equalled and perhaps surpassed him, if he had had at his disposal a mine so rich, so brilliant fire. Besides it is never taken into account, either in the measure or in the prosody of the lines. Thus these two lines of Dryden rhyme exactly:
"Now scarce the Trojan fleet with sails and oars Had left behind the fair Sicilian shores. ..."
Mneid, b. i., v. 50. It is the same in these of Addison :
"Tune ev'ry string and ev'ry tongue, Be thou the Muse and subject of our song. ..."
St. Cecilia's Day, i., 10. or these from Goldsmith:
"How often have I loiter 'd o'er thy green, Where humble happiness endeared each scene."
The Deserted Village, i., 7.
loo The Golden Verses of Pythagoras as that of the mysteries of Orpheus; if he had made use of a language so harmonious, if his taste had been able to be refined at the school of Pindar or of Homer.
At the epoch of his birth, Europe scarcely emerged from the gloom of barbarism; the theatre, given over to ridiculous mountebanks, profaned in indecent farces the incomprehensible mysteries of the Christian religion, and the English tongue, still crude and unformed, had not succeeded in amalgamating in one siugle body the opposed dialects of which it was successively formed.
In spite of these obstacles, Shakespeare stamped upon England a movement of which Europe felt the influence. Raised by the sole force of his genius to the essence of dramatic poetry, he dared to seek for his subjects in the mythology of Odin, and put upon the stage, in Hamlet and in Macbeth, tableaux of the highest character. '
' There remains to us of this poetry the very precious fragments contained in the Edda and in Voluspa. The Edda, whose name signifies great-grandmother, is a collection, fairly ample, of Scandinavian traditions. Voluspa is a sort of Sibylline book, or cosmogonic oracle, as its name indicates. I am convinced that if the poets of the north, the Danes, Swedes, and Germans, had oftener drawn their subjects from these indigenous sources, they would have succeeded better than by going to Greece to seek them upon the summits of Parnassus. The mythology of Odin, descended from the Rhipaean mountains, suits them better than that of the Greeks, whose tongue furthermore is not conformable here. When one makes the moon and the wife {der Mond, das Weib) of masculine and neuter gender; when one makes thesvm, the air, time, love {die Sonne, die Luft, die Zeit, die Liebe) of femiijine gender, one ought wisely to renounce thte allegories of Parnassus. It was on account of the sex given to the sun and the moon that the schism arose, of which I have spoken, in explaining the origin of the temple of Delphi.
The Scandinavian allegories, however, that I consider a debris of Thradan allegories, furnishing subjects of a very different character from those of the Greeks and Latins, might have varied the poetry of Europe and prevented the Arabesque fiction from holding there so much ascendancy. The Scandinavian verses, being without rhyme, hold moreover, to eumolpoeia. The following is a strophe from Voluspa:
"Avant que le temps f<it, Ymir avait 6t6; Ni la mer, ni nes vents n'existaient pas encore; II n'6tait de terre, il n'^tait point de ciel: Tout n'^tait qu'un abtme immense, sans verdure."
The Essence and Form of Poetry loi
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