690 THE SURVIVAL OF CLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY
morphoses and reminded them of the example of "young Austin" (St. Augustine),
who wept for Dido when he should have shed tears for Christ.^8
More powerful voices attacked the primacy of the classics in education on
utilitarian grounds or because they were thought to be a sign of the subservience
of America to the Old World. Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1837 spoke for the in-
tellectual independence of America: "We have listened too long to the courtly
muses of Europe." Noah Webster in 1783, Francis Hopkinson in 1784, Benjamin
Rush in 1789, Thomas Paine in 1795—all spoke eloquently for broadening the
base of American education. Although the classical languages remained an es-
sential part of college entrance requirements (and therefore of the school cur-
riculum) until the twentieth century, the arguments of Webster and Rush were
effective, and the moral arguments that supported the classics in Europe (espe-
cially in Britain) were less widely heard in America. Nevertheless, the study of
mythology was still thought to have some value, and Thomas Bulfinch, whose
Age of Fable was published in 1855, believed that it could promote virtue and
happiness even if it was not useful knowledge.
Nathaniel Hawthorne quite purposefully pursued a moral goal in retelling
the myths in his Wonder Book (1851) and Tanglewood Tales (1853). In the preface
to the former, he said that the myths were "legitimate subjects for every age to
clothe with its own garniture of manners and sentiment, and to imbue with its
own morality." Thus in the story of the Apples of the Hesperides ("The Three
Golden Apples") Hercules is imagined to feel regret that he had spent so long
talking to the Graeae, and Hawthorne comments:¥
But thus it always is with persons who are destined to perform great things.
What they have already done seems less than nothing. What they have taken in
hand to do seems worth toil, danger, and life itself.It is difficult to combine this attitude with Ovid's stories of the gods in love
or with the shameful acts of many heroes. Hawthorne simply left out Theseus'
desertion of Ariadne and Jason's of Medea. "The objectionable characteristics
seem to be a parasitical growth, having no essential connection with the origi-
nal fable" (from "The Wayside," in Tanglewood Tales). Jupiter becomes consis-
tently dignified: in the tale of Baucis and Philemon ("The Miraculous Pitcher"),
Philemon is impressed by the disguised god:Here was the grandest figure that ever sat so humbly beside a cottage door.
When the stranger conversed it was with gravity, and in such a way that Phile-
mon felt irresistibly moved to tell him everything which he had most at heart.
This is always the feeling that people have, when they meet with anyone wise
enough to comprehend all their good and evil, and to despise not a tittle of it.Indeed the bowdlerization of Ovid was both a feature of school texts in the
nineteenth century and a reason for his decline. George Stuart (1882), in his
widely used text, omitted all the love stories (even Daphne!), except for those