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 single 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.[1]*
- ↑ There remains to us of this poetry the very precious fragments contained
in the Edda and in Voluspa. The Edda, whose name signifies great-grand-*mother,
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 Rhipæan 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 the sun, the air,
time, love (die Sonne, die Luft, die Zeit, die Liebe) of feminine gender, one
ought wisely to renounce the 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 débris of Thracian
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 eumolpœia. The
following is a strophe from Voluspa:
"Avant que le temps fût, Ymir avait été;
Ni la mer, ni nes vents n'existaient pas encore;
Il n'était de terre, il n'était point de ciel:
Tout n'était qu'un abîme immense, sans verdure."
