The original article contained illustrations that have been omitted here.
Bulfinch's Mythology
Without a doubt, The Age of Fable formed the image that millions of Americans had of the classical gods and heroes. Before Edith Hamilton's widely used text, the mythology learned by Americans was Bulfinch's mythology. The National Union Catalog lists well over 100 editions, either of the book by itself or, with two of Bulfinch's collections of non-classical legends, as part of a trilogy; and in addition to these, there are various spin-offs more or less related to the original. Historians of American publishing--for example, Frank Luther Mott and Jacob Blanck--include it in their lists of long-time best sellers and public favorites. Literati who have written introductions to later editions, such as Dudley Fitts (Heritage Press, 1958), and Robert Graves (Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1968) compare it to such classic works for readers of all ages as Robinson Crusoe, Alice in Wonderland, and Tom Sawyer. A recent lavishly illustrated edition, published in hard cover and paperback (Viking Press, Inc., 1979; Penguin Books, 1981), has sold 45,000 copies in the United States even though it is more expensive than some other versions.
Burton Feldman and Robert D. Richardson, in The Rise of Modern Mythology, 1680-1860 (Indiana University Press, 1972), place Bulfinch's book in the category of "Victorian popular mythology" along with the other successful collections of myths published in the 1850s: Wonderbook and Tanglewood Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne and The Heroes by English novelist Charles Kingsley. The Age of Fable, however, was far more ambitious than the other works and differed radically from them.
Bulfinch did not, as did Hawthorne and Kingsley, simply adapt the myths for contemporary readers. They wrote primarily to entertain; he wrote to instruct by making the material entertaining. "Thus we hope to teach mythology," he explains in his preface, "not as a study, but as a relaxation from study; to give our work the charm of a story-book, yet by means of it to impart a knowledge of an important branch of education." Bulfinch also has a far broader scope and audience. Whereas Hawthorne and Kingsley each retold a few myths primarily for children, Bulfinch recreated dozens of myths, discussed their use in modern poetry, and wrote for both adults and young people.
The Age of Fable consists of prose narratives of classical myths, chiefly from Ovid (as well as some stories from Norse, Oriental, and Egyptian mythologies), information about ancient classical writers and artists, and lists for reference. Intertwined with Bulfinch's narrative are myth-related quotations from poetry, chiefly British. The subject of the book, he emphasizes in his preface, is not just mythology, but "mythology as connected with literature."
Edward Everett Hale in 1882 revised and enlarged the original work and added the title Bulfinch's Mythology. In his preface he explains Bulfinch's plan:
[It] was not simply what has been done by Kingsley, Hawthorne, Coxe, and many other writers since Mr. Bulfinch's book was published--the writing, for young readers, of selected stories from the mythology, in modern language. What Mr. Bulfinch wanted to do, and succeeded in doing, was to connect the old stories with modern literature.
Bulfinch and Hawthorne differed, too, in their attitudes toward the ancient classics. Hawthorne, writing to the publisher, James T. Fields, about his plan for the Wonderbook, had vowed to use a tone that would avoid "the classic coldness which is as repellent as the touch of marble." Hawthorne's boyhood education was uneven, and evidently his classical training at Bowdoin College had chilled rather than warmed him. Bulfinch, coming from long and thorough training in Latin at Boston Latin School, Phillips Exeter, and Harvard, felt no such aversion. As a young man, he demonstrated a facility with Latin and zest for classical study in an anonymously published poem "To Edward Everett," just appointed Harvard's first professor of Greek literature. In his old age he acknowledged the lasting impact of his brief post as teacher of classical subjects at Boston Latin School.
Bulfinch's strong background in classical literature, especially that of Rome, accounts for his success in adapting Ovid for American readers. Although he included material from other ancient authors, notably Homer and Vergil, the majority of the myths in The Age of Fable are his own translations from the Metamorphoses, the chief source for classical myth in Western literature and art. Bulfinch abridged, bowdlerized, and rearranged Ovid, and at times added a tidbit or two from other sources. Yet, his translations of the ancient author's powerfully wrought details of physical description and human behavior convey Ovidian sprightliness and charm. In Dudley Fitz's words,
It is as though Bulfinch had so saturated his mind with Ovid that he could call the ghost up, without conscious effort and certainly without strain, to exert the ancient enchantment in an unforeseen and unexpectedly appealing way.
The story of Proserpine, Ceres's daughter who was kidnapped by the God of the Underworld, typifies Bulfinch's style in translating and adapting the Roman poet. Of Ovid's more than three hundred hexameters of story, Bulfinch's prose give us approximately half. He adds a non-Ovidian account of Ceres' visit at Eleusis and omits some of the stories within the text, such as the transformation into Sirens of the girls who were with Proserpine when Pluto appeared. He combines Ovid's separated fragments of the story of Arethusa, the Nereid who escaped in the form of an underground river from the water god Alpheus, and, while under the earth, caught sight of Proserpine. Bulfinch also purges Ovid of sexual references his readers would have found offensive. In Ovid, Proserpine tucks flowers into her bosom; in Bulfinch, she tucks them into an apron.
In spite of such changes, Bulfinch strives to give his readers Ovid. Cupid, "straining the bow against his knee," prepares to shoot his arrow at Pluto. As the King of the Underworld swoops down on Proserpine, he urges his horses on, "throwing loose over their heads and necks his iron-colored reins." When Ceres, mourning her daughter, withholds her favors from the earth, "there was too much sun, there was too much rain; the birds stole the seeds--thistles and brambles were the only growth." Arethusa, whom Diana has hidden, with a mist, from the pursuing river god, trembles "like a lamb that hears the wolf growling outside the fold."
Having retold Ovid's story, Bulfinch notes in passing that it is an allegory for the seasons, and then shifts into "poetical citations," as he calls them in his preface, which illustrate the use of the myth of Proserpine by modern poets. Annotating as he quotes, he cites short passages from Milton (whom he quotes forty times in The Age of Fable), Thomas Hood, Coleridge, and, in two separate passages, one of his favorites, the Irish poet Thomas Moore.
Taken together, the five passages following the Proserpine myth exemplify the three main functions of classical myth in the poetry Bulfinch cites: to create certain emotional affects, most commonly awe or sensuous delight; to raise discourse to a level more refined than that of ordinary speech; and to supply a common store of images to animate abstractions.
Milton's lines from Paradise Lost, hailing Eden as even more beautiful than "that fair field" where Proserpine gathered flowers; Coleridge's "Where Alph, the sacred river, ran/ Through caverns measureless to man," and Moore's lines describing an Italian painting of cupids dancing to celebrate Pluto's conquest, "cheek after cheek, like rosebuds in a wreath," recreate an exotic pagan world abounding in sensuous detail (in Coleridge's case, Oriental as well as classical). Moore's lines, "O My beloved, how divinely sweet/ Is the pure joy when kindred spirits meet," introducing the image of the river god's mingling with the much-pursued fountain, Arethusa, typify the use of classical myth to raise the level of discourse. The comparison of a meeting of kindred spirits to mingling waters also animates an abstraction, as does Hood's image, which throws into relief what it means to turn from happiness to grief: "As frightened Proserpine let fall/ Her flowers at the sight of Dis."
Bulfinch drew his 188 "citations" from the work of forty poets. All were British except for three--Longfellow, Lowell, and Stephen Greenleaf Bulfinch, brother of the author. The shining lights of English literature--Milton and Coleridge, Spenser, Shakespeare, Dryden, Pope, Swift, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, and Tennyson--dominate. Also included, however, are some of the minor poets popular in Bulfinch's time, for example, Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin's uncle.
In using poetry as a counterpoint in The Age of Fable, Bulfinch was tapping into an interest of the general educated public. His criterion for choosing selections, he explains in his preface, was popularity; these are passages which "are most frequently quoted or alluded to in reading or conversation." Many of the poets who appear in The Age of Fable are represented in William Holmes McGuffey's Eclectic Readers, and also in the "gift books." A phenomenon of Bulfinch's era, these literary annuals containing poetry, stories, and moral maxims were great favorites with middle-class Americans and helped create, in that level of society, a demand for literature and art.
More often than not, Bulfinch's literary discernment transcends the merely popular. Considered a group, the "poetical citations" in The Age of Fable form an anthology of myth-related poetry. Interwoven with the myths on which they draw, they interact dynamically with the ancient material, as Bulfinch intended in his design. In 1863 he published the "literature" alone, in Poetry of the Age of Fable, which contains most of the poems he had cited in the earlier book and dozens of others using images from the myths.
What led Bulfinch--a full-time bank clerk, who did not write for a living--to put together the combination of ancient myth and modern poetry that is The Age of Fable? During his fifties and sixties, he wrote eight books, all but two of them popularizations of traditional Western literature. Unquestionably, he was following the altruistic example of his architect father and hoping to serve the American public confronted by enormous societal change. He was responding, in particular, to the rise of science and technology, a decline in classical learning, and increasing educational opportunities.
His six years of service as secretary of the Boston Society of Natural History, a forum for many prominent scientists of the day, had made him aware of the expanding volume of scientific knowledge and the consequent threat to the classics as the traditional basis of education beyond primary schooling. In writing The Age of Fable, he broke the pattern of classical instruction by rote and ingeniously copied the naturalists' methods of rearranging and selecting material to find new relationships.
Classical learning was already in decline, in contrast to its respected role in the eighteenth century. Meyer Reinhold in Classica Americana (Wayne State University Press, 1984) calls the period 1790-1830 a "Silver Age" for classics, during which classical learning was seen as pedantic, elitist, impractical, and even detrimental to the new American nationalism. Rote teaching methods for classical languages, which produced only superficial learning, were partly to blame, as was the paucity of classical scholarship in the United States. Bulfinch in his preface refers to the dryness of English-language manuals of mythology, probably some of the very ones that Feldman and Richardson describe as "handbooks boiled out of handbooks. . . boiled out of still earlier handbooks."
Education as a whole, in Bulfinch's day, was in a state of upheaval. Starting with Andrew Jackson's presidency (1829-37) and its emphasis on the "common man," Americans had striven to establish better educational opportunities for people at all levels of society. In the era of the 1830s through the 1850s, free elementary schooling was becoming an established right for many Americans; in secondary education, the academies flourished. Colleges were founded, making higher education more accessible than before. Outside the confines of formal schooling, libraries and agencies that resemble the "night school" of a later era--lyceums and mechanics' institutes--were conduits for learning.
For the purpose of educating his fellow countrymen, Bulfinch directed his book to these out-of-school audiences. He imagined The Age of Fable not in a classroom, but in "the parlor." His audience was not to be school children, but "the reader of English literature, of either sex," others "more advanced" who may require mythological knowledge when they visit museums or "mingle in cultivated society," and, also, readers "in advanced life."
The book has been used in schools, however, mainly as a standard reference work for American teachers. Throughout the twentieth century, teachers, writing for other teachers, have recommended The Age of Fable to one another, in articles appearing in reference works, in government bulletins, and, more than in any other place, in nationally distributed teachers' periodicals. References appear in G. Staley Hall's The Pedagogical Seminary, Paul Monroe's 1913 Cyclopedia of Education, bulletins of the U.S. Bureau of Education and the state of Illinois, and in such periodicals as Instructor, Social Education, Grade Teacher, Elementary English, Gifted Child Quarterly, The Clearinghouse, and English Journal.
The presence of The Age of Fable on teachers' book shelves and in homes across America for well over a hundred years has assured for Bulfinch a place as progenitor of the strong American fascination with classical mythology in art and literature. His book is an endorsement of cultural egalitarianism. In dedicating The Age of Fable to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Bulfinch called the popular writer, who was also a gifted scholar of language and literature, "the poet alike of the many and the few." What Bulfinch proves is that in America the poetry and story of our common classical past are not only for the few, but for the many.