FOOTNOTES:

Some of the greatest names in art, philosophy, and literature still belong to this fourth period. The chief of all is Aristotle,il maestro di color che sanno, the absorber of all previous and contemporary knowledge into one coherent system, the legislator for the human intellect through eighteen centuries after his death. It is worth observing that Aristotle, unlike Socrates and Plato, is not a citizen of Athens, but of the small Thracian town Stageira. Thus, at the moment when philosophy lost its essentially Hellenic character and became cosmopolitan in Aristotle, the mantle devolved upon an alien. Again Aristotle was the tutor of Alexander. The two greatest men of the fourth period are thus brought into the closest relations. In pure literature the most eminent productions of this period are the orations of Æschines, Demosthenes, Isocrates, and the comedies of Menander. It is not a little significant that we should have retained no authentic fragment of the speeches of Pericles—except in so far as we may trust Thucydides—while the studied rhetoric of these politicallyfar less important orators should have been so copiously preserved. The reign of mere talk was imminent. Oratory was coming to be studied as an art, and practised, not as a potent instrument in politics, but as an end in itself. Men were beginning to think more of how they spoke than of what they might achieve by speaking. Besides, the whole Athenian nation, as dikasts and as ecclesiasts, were interested in rhetoric. The first masters of eloquence considered as a fine art were therefore idolized. Demosthenes, Æschines, Isocrates, combined the fire of vehement partisans and impassioned politicians with the consummate skill of professional speech-makers. After their days rhetoric in Greece became a matter of frigid display—an ἀγώνισμα ἐς τὸ παράχρημα. In the comedies of Menander, as far as we may judge of them from fragments and critiques, and from their Latin copies, a very noticeable change in the spirit of literature is apparent. The so-called New Comedy, of which he was the representative, is the product of a meditative and inactive age. The great concerns of the world, and of human life seen in its profoundest depth, which formed the staple of Aristophanes, have been abandoned. We are brought close to domesticities: the events of common life occupy the stage of Menander. The audience of Aristophanes listened with avidity to comedies of which politics upon the grandest scale were the substance. Menander invited his Athenians to the intrigues of young men, slaves, and hetairai, at warfare with niggardly parents. Athens has ceased to be an empress. She has become a garrulous housewife. She contents herself with studious analysis and refined amusements—still splendid with intelligence and dignified with wisdom, but not weighty with the consciousness of power, nor throbbing with the pulses of superabundant youthfulness and vigor.

In the fine arts this fourth period was still inventive. Under Alexander painting, which had received its Hellenic characterfrom Polygnotus and Zeuxis, continued to flourish with Apelles. Indeed, it may be fairly said that while art in the heroic period was confined to the perfecting of the human body, in the second period it produced architecture, in the third sculpture, and in the fourth painting—this being apparently the natural order of progression in the evolution of the fine arts. Lysippus, meanwhile, worthily represents the craft of the statuary in Alexander's age; while the coins and gems of this time show that the glyptic and numismatic arts were at their zenith of technical perfection. Of Greek music, in the absence of all sure information, it is difficult to speak. Yet it is probable that the age of Alexander witnessed a new and more complex development of orchestral music. We hear of vast symphonies performed at the Macedonian court. Nor is this inconsistent with what we know about the history of art; for music attains independence, ceases to be the handmaid of poetry or dancing, only in an age of intellectual reflectiveness. When nations have expressed themselves in the more obvious and external arts, they seek through harmonies and melodies to give form to their emotions.

The fifth, last, and longest period is one of decline and decay. But these words must be used with qualification when we speak of a people like the Greeks. What is meant is, that the Greeks never recovered their national vigor or produced men so great as those whom we have hitherto been mentioning. The Macedonian empire prepared the way for the Roman: Hellenic civilization put on the garb of servitude to Rome and to Christianity. Henceforth we must not look to Greece proper for the more eminent achievements of the still surviving spirit of the Greeks. Greek culture in its decadence has become the heritage of the whole world. Syrians, Egyptians, Phrygians, Romans, carry on the tradition inherited from Athens. Hellas is less a nation now than an intellectual commonwealth, a society of culture holding variousraces in communion. The spiritual republic established thus by the Greek genius prepares the way for Christian brotherhood: the liberty of the children of the Muses leads onward to the freedom of the sons of God.

In this period, the chief centres are first Alexandria and Athens, then Rome and Byzantium. The real successors of Alexander were his generals. But the only dynasty founded by them which rises into eminence by its protection of the arts and literature was the Ptolemaic. At Alexandria, under the Ptolemies, libraries were formed and sciences were studied. Euclid the geometer, Aratus the astronomer, Ptolemy the cosmographer, add lustre to the golden age of Alexandrian culture. Callimachus at the same time leads a tribe of learned poets and erudite men of letters. Dramas meant to be read, like Lycophron'sCassandra; epics composed in the study, like theArgonauticaof Apollonius Rhodius, form the diversion of the educated world. Meanwhile the whole genus of parasiticlittérateursbegin to flourish: grammarians, who settle and elucidate texts with infinite labor and some skill; sophists and rhetoricians, whose purpose in life it is to adorn imaginary subjects and to defend problematical theses with conceits of the fancy and ingenious subtleties of reasoning. A young man writing to his mistress, a dinner-seeker who has failed to get an invitation, Themistocles at the Persian court, celebrated statues, philosophical puzzles—everything that can be wordily elaborated is grist for their mill. The art of writing without having anything particular to say, the sister art of quarrying the thoughts of other people and setting them in elaborate prolixities of style, are brought to perfection. At the same time, side by side with these literary moths and woodlice, are the more industrious ants—the collectors of anecdotes, compilers of biographies, recorders of quotations, composers of all sorts of commonplace books, students of the paste-brush and scissors sort, to whom we owe much forthe preservation of scraps of otherwise lost treasures. Into such mechanical and frigid channels has the life of literature passed. Literature is no longer an integral part of the national existence, but a form of polite amusement. The genius of Hellas has nothing better to do than to potter about like adilettanteamong her treasures.

The only true poets of this period are the Sicilian idyllists. Over the waning day of Greek poetry Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus cast the sunset hues of their excessive beauty. Genuine and exquisite is their inspiration; pure, sincere, and true is their execution. Yet we agree with Shelley, who compares their perfume to "the odor of the tuberose, which overcomes and sickens the spirit with excess of sweetness." In the same way the erotic epigrammatists, though many of them genuine poets, especially the exquisite Meleager of Gadara, in the very perfection of their peculiar quality of genius offer an unmistakable sign of decay. It is the fashion among a certain class of modern critics to extol the art of decadence, to praise the hectic hues of consumption, and even the dull livors of corruption, above the roses and the lilies of health. Let them peruse the epigrams of Meleager and of Straton. Of beauty in decay sufficient splendors may be found there.

While Alexandria was thus carrying the poetic tradition of Hellas to its extremity in the idyl and the epigram—carving cherrystones after the sculptor's mallet had been laid aside—and was continuing the criticism which had been set on foot by Aristotle, Athens persisted in her function of educating Europe. She remained a sort of university, in which the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle were adequately developed, though not in the most comprehensive spirit, by a crowd of peripatetic and academic sages, and where the founders of the Epicurean and Stoic schools gave a new direction to thought. It was during the first vigorof the Epicurean and Stoic teaching that the spirit of Hellas came into contact with the spirit of Rome. Hence Lucretius, Cicero, the satirists—whatever, in fact, Rome may boast of philosophy, retains the tincture of the ethics of her schoolmasters. Rome, as Virgil proudly said, was called to govern—not to write poems or carve statues, but to quell the proud and spare the abject. Still she caught, to some extent, the æsthetic manners of her captive. Consequently, long after the complete political ascendency of Rome was an established fact, and geographical Greece had become an insignificant province, the Hellenic spirit led the world. And some of its latest products are still dazzling in beauty, marvellous in ingenuity, Titanic in force. A few names selected from the list of Græco-Roman authors will be more impressive than much description. Plutarch of Chæronea, in the first century, the author of the great biographies; Lucian, the Syrian, in the second century, the master of irony and graceful dialogue and delicate description; Epictetus, the Phrygian slave, in the second century, who taught the latest form of Stoicism to the Romans, and had for his successor Marcus Aurelius; Philostratus of Lemnos, the rhetorician and author of the life of Apollonius; Plotinus, Porphyrius, and Proclus, the revivers of Platonic philosophy under a new form of mysticism at Alexandria during the third and fourth centuries; Longinus, the critic, who adorned Palmyra in the third century;[7]Heliodorus of Emesa, Achilles Tatius, Longus, Musæus, the erotic novelists and poets of the fourth and fifth centuries—these, not to mention the Christian fathers, are a few of the great men whom Greece produced in this last period. But now notice how miscellaneous in nationality and in pursuit they are. One only is a Greek of the old stock—Plutarch, the Bœotian. One is a slave from Phrygia. Another is a Roman emperor.

A fourth is a native of the desert city of Tadmor. Two are Syrians. One is a Greek of the Ægean. Another is an Egyptian. From this we may see how the genius of the Greeks had been spread abroad to embrace all lands. No fact better illustrates the complete leavening of the world by their spirit.

But considering that this fifth period may be said to cover six centuries, from the death of Alexander to about 300 after Christ—for why should we continue our computation into the dreary regions of Byzantine dulness?—it must be confessed that it is sterile in productiveness and inferior in the quality of its crop to any of the previous periods. Subtle and beautiful is the genius of Hellas still, because itisGreek; strong and stern it is in part, because it has been grafted on the Roman character; its fascinations and compulsions are powerful enough to bend the metaphysics of the Christian faith. Yet, after all, it is but a shadow of its own self.

After the end of the fourth century the iconoclastic zeal and piety of the Christians put an end practically to Greek art and literature. Christianity was at that time the superior force in the world; and though Clement of Alexandria contended for an amicable treaty of peace between Greek culture and the new creed, though the two Gregories and Basil were, to use the words of Gibbon, "distinguished above all their contemporaries by the rare union of profane eloquence and orthodox piety," though the bishops of the Church were selected from the ranks of scholars trained by Libanius and other Greek sophists, yet the spirit of Christianity proved fatal to the spirit of Greek art. Early in the fifth century the Christian rabble at Alexandria, under the inspiration of their ferocious despot Cyril, tore in pieces Hypatia, the last incarnation of the dying beauty of the Greeks. She had turned her eye backward to Homer and to Plato, dreaming that haply even yet the gods of Hellas might assert their power andresume the government of the world, and that the wisdom of Athens might supplant the folly of Jerusalem. But it was a vain and idle dream. The genius of Greece was effete. Christianity was pregnant with the mediæval and the modern world. In violence and bloodshed the Gospel triumphed. This rending in pieces of the past, this breaking-down of temples and withering of illusions, was no doubt necessary. New wine cannot be poured into old bottles. No cycle succeeds another cycle in human affairs without convulsions and revolutions that rouse the passions of humanity. It is thus that

God fulfils himself in many ways,Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

Yet even in this last dire struggle of the spirit of pagan art with the spirit of Christian faith, when beauty had become an abomination in the eyes of the Holiest, on the ruins, as it were, of the desecrated fanes of Hellas, weeds lovely in their rankness flourished. While Cyril's mobs were dismembering Hypatia, the erotic novelists went on writing about Daphnis, and Musæus sang the lamentable death of Leander. Nonnus was perfecting a new and more polished form of the hexameter. These were the last notes of Greek poetry. In these faint and too melodious strains the Muse took final farewell of her beloved Hellas. And when, after the lapse of a thousand years, the world awoke upon the ruins of the past, these were among the first melodies which caught its ear. One of the three first Greek books issued from the Aldine press about the year 1493, and called by Aldus the "precursors," was the poem of Hero and Leander. It was reprinted at Paris in 1507 by De Gourmont, at Alcala in Spain in 1514, and at Cologne in 1517 by Hirschhorn. Our Marlowe in the sixteenth century translated Musæus. The French Amyot translated Longus, and bequeathed to his nation a voluminousliterature of pastorals founded upon the tale of Chloe. Tasso and Guarini, in Italy, caught the same strain; so that the accents of the modern Renaissance were an echo of the last utterances of dying Greece. The golden age of pastoral innocence, thebell' età dell' oro, of which the Alexandrians had been dreaming in the midst of their effete and decaying civilization, fascinated the imagination of our immediate ancestors, when, three centuries ago, they found the sun of art and beauty shining in the heavens, new worlds to conquer, and indefinite expansions of the spirit to be realized.

FOOTNOTES:[1]My special debt to Hegel'sPhilosophy of Historyin this paragraph ought to be acknowledged.[2]I do not mean by this thatonepoet must have composed both epics, but that each bears upon it the mark of unity in conception and execution. Whether the same poet produced both is a different question, and I am inclined to accept theOdysseyas a later work.[3]The date of Pheidon is in truth unfixed. According to recent calculations, he may have celebrated the 28th and not the 8th Olympiad. The involved alteration in his date would bring him into closer connection with the other despots.[4]TheMargites Eiresione, attributed by the Greeks to Homer, contain possibly the earliest fragments of iambic verses.[5]Satire, it is well known, was permitted at some of the festivals of Demeter; and the legend of the maid Iambé, who alone could draw a smile from Demeter, after she had lost Persephone, seems to symbolize the connection of iambic recitations with the cultus of this goddess.[6]Nothing overmuch; measure is best; know thyself; know the right moment; against necessity not even gods fight.[7]Recent criticism renders the age and country of the critic Longinus doubtful.

[1]My special debt to Hegel'sPhilosophy of Historyin this paragraph ought to be acknowledged.

[2]I do not mean by this thatonepoet must have composed both epics, but that each bears upon it the mark of unity in conception and execution. Whether the same poet produced both is a different question, and I am inclined to accept theOdysseyas a later work.

[3]The date of Pheidon is in truth unfixed. According to recent calculations, he may have celebrated the 28th and not the 8th Olympiad. The involved alteration in his date would bring him into closer connection with the other despots.

[4]TheMargites Eiresione, attributed by the Greeks to Homer, contain possibly the earliest fragments of iambic verses.

[5]Satire, it is well known, was permitted at some of the festivals of Demeter; and the legend of the maid Iambé, who alone could draw a smile from Demeter, after she had lost Persephone, seems to symbolize the connection of iambic recitations with the cultus of this goddess.

[6]Nothing overmuch; measure is best; know thyself; know the right moment; against necessity not even gods fight.

[7]Recent criticism renders the age and country of the critic Longinus doubtful.

The Notion of a Systematic Pantheon.—Homer and Hesiod.—Mythology before Homer.—Supposed Conditions of the Mythopœic Age.—Vico.—The Childhood of the World.—Goethe's Boyhood.—Mythology is a Body of Rudimentary Thought, Penetrated with the Spirit of the Nation.—Different Views of the Greek Myths.—Grote.—Relics of a Primitive Revelation.—The Symbolic Hypothesis.—Rationalism and Euhemerus.—Fetichism.—Poetic Theory.—The Linguistic Theory.—Comparative Philology.—Solar Theory.—The Myth of Herakles: its Solar Interpretation—its Ethical Significance.—Summary of the Points Suggested with Regard to Mythology.—Mediæval Myths.—The Action of the Greek Intelligence upon Mythology: in Art—in Philosophy.—Persistence of the National Polytheism.—Homer Allegorized at Alexandria.—Triumph of Christianity.—The Greek Pantheon in the Middle Ages.—Greek Mythology Recovers Poetic and Artistic Value in the Renaissance.

It has been remarked with justice that, when we use the word mythology, we are too apt to think of a Pantheon, of a well-defined hierarchy of gods and demigods and heroes, all fabulous indeed, but all arranged in one coherent system. This conception of Greek mythology arises partly from the fact that we learn to know it in dictionaries, compiled from the works of authors who lived long after the age in which myths were produced, and partly from the fact that the conditions under which myth-making was a possibility are so far removed from us as to be almost unintelligible. Yet there is some truth in what, upon the whole, is an erroneous view. Although the Greek myths, in their origin, were not a well-digested system, still they formed a complete body ofnational thought, on which the intelligence of the Greek race, in its art and its religion, was continually working, until it took the final form in which we have it in our dictionaries. What remained in the Pantheon of Apollodorus and Hyginus, remained there by no freak of accident. What was omitted by Homer and by Hesiod was omitted by no operation of blind chance. The spirit of the Greeks was concerned in the purification and the preservation of their myths, and the unity of that spirit constitutes the unity of their mythology.

Two great poets gave to Greek mythology the form which it maintained in the historic period. Herodotus says that "Homer and Hesiod named the gods, and settled their genealogies for the Hellenes." What this means is, that at a certain prehistoric epoch, the epoch of epic poetry, mythology had passed from the primitive and fluid state, and had become the subject-matter of the arts. Between the mythopœic liberty of creation and the collections of the grammarians was interposed the poetry, the sculpture, and the religious ritual of the historic Greeks. What we have to deal with at the present moment is, not mythology as it appears in art, but the genesis of the myths conceived as a body of Greek thought and fancy in their infantine or rudimentary stages.

What was mythology before Homer? How did it come into existence? How were the Greeks brought to believe that there was a supreme father of gods and men called Zeus, a wise patroness of arts and sciences called Pallas, a pure and glorious and far-darting deity called Phœbus? There is no one who does not acknowledge something sublime and beautiful in this part of the Greek mythology. Even those who do not care to comprehend the growth of these conceptions admit that the genius of the race shone with splendor peculiar to itself in their creation.

To this question must be counterpoised another. What arewe to think about the many repulsive, grotesque, and hideous elements of Greek mythology—the incest and adultery of Zeus, the cannibalism of Kronos, the profligacy of Aphrodite, the cruelty of Phœbus? When thought began to be conscious of itself in Greece these abominations moved the anger of the philosophers. Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Pindar, and Plato, in succession, recognized that the mythical fables were incompatible with the notion of deity, and rejected them forthwith. Modern students have been so disgusted by the same indecencies that some of them have abandoned Greek mythology as hopeless, while others have taken refuge in the extraordinary paradox that myths are a disease of language. These methods of dealing with the problem are alike unphilosophical. It is impossible for the historian to reject what formed the groundwork of religious and artistic thought in Greece. It is childish to represent the human mind as a sort of bound Mazeppa, stretched helpless on the wild horse, Language, which carries it away into the wilderness.

In order to understand the two questions which have been propounded, we must make a demand upon our imagination, and endeavor to return, in thought at least, to the conditions of a people in the mythopœic age—the age, that is to say, in which not only were myths naturally made, but all the thinking of a nation took the form of myths. We must go back to a time when there were no written records, when there were no systems of thought, when language had not been subjected to analysis of any kind, when abstract notions were unknown, when science had not begun to exist, when history was impossible, and when the whole world was a land of miracles. There was no check then laid upon fancy, because nothing as yet was conceived as thought, but everything existed as sensation. In this infancy the nation told itself stories, and believed in them. The same faculties of the mind which afterwards gave birth to poetry and theology,philosophy and state-craft, science and history, were now so ill-defined and merely germinal that they produced but fables. Yet these faculties were vigorous and vivid. The fables they produced were infinite in number and variety, beautiful, and so pregnant with thought under the guise of fancy that long centuries scarcely sufficed for disengaging all that they contained. In dealing with Greek mythology it must be remembered that the nation with whose mythopœic imagination we are concerned was the Greek nation.[8]It had already in itself all Hellas, as the seed enfolds the plant.

A famous passage in Vico's workDella Metafisica Poeticamay here be paraphrased, in order to make the conditions under which we must imagine myths to have arisen more intelligible:[9]"Poetry, which was the first form of wisdom, began with a system of thought, not reasoned or abstract, as ours is now, but felt and imagined, as was natural in the case of those primitive human beings who had developed no reasoning faculties, but were all made up of senses in the highest physical perfection, and of the most vigorous imaginations. In their total ignorance of causes they wondered at everything; and their poetry was all divine, because they ascribed to gods the objects of their wonder, and thought that beings like themselves, but greater, could alone have caused them. Thus they were like children whom we notice taking into their hands inanimate things, and playing and talking with them as though they were living persons. When thunderterrified them, they attributed their own nature to the phenomenon; and being apt to express their most violent passions by howls and roarings, they conceived heaven as a vast body, which gave notice of its anger by lightnings and thunderings. The whole of nature, in like manner, they imagined to be a vast animated body, capable of feeling and passion." Vico then proceeds to point out how difficult it is for us, who, through long centuries, have removed ourselves as far as possible from the life of the instincts, senses, and imagination, whose language has become full of abstract terms, whose conception of the universe has been formed by science, whose thought is critical and reflective, and who have been educated in a rational theology, to comprehend the attitude of primitive humanity in its personifying stage of thought.

In this childhood of the world, when the Greek myths came into existence, the sun was called a shepherd, and the clouds were his sheep; or an archer, and the sunbeams were his arrows. It was easier then to think of the sea as a husky-voiced and turbulent old man, whose true form none might clearly know, because he changed so often and was so secret in his ways, who shook the earth in his anger, and had the white-maned billows of the deep for horses, than to form a theory of the tides. The spring of the year became a beautiful youth, beloved by the whole earth, or beloved, like Hyacinthus, by the sun, or, like Adonis, by the queen of beauty, over whom the fate of death was suspended, and for whose loss annual mourning was made. Such tales the Greeks told themselves in their youth; and it would be wrong to suppose that deliberate fiction played any part in their creation. To conceive of the world thus was natural to the whole race; and the tales that sprang up formed the substance of their intellectual activity. Here, then, if anywhere, we watch the process of a people in its entirety contributing to form a body of imaginativethought, projecting itself in a common and unconscious work of art. Nor will it avail to demur that behind the Greeks there stretched a dim and distant past, that many of their myths had already taken shape, to some extent, before the separation of the Aryan families. That is now an ascertained fact, the bearings of which will have to be discussed farther on in this chapter. For the moment it is enough to reply that not the similarities, but the differences, brought to light by the study of comparative mythology are important for the historian of each several race. The raw material of silk may interest the merchant or the man of science; the artist cares for the manufactured fabric, with its curious patterns and refulgent hues.

In order further to illustrate the conditions of the mythopœic age, a passage from theDichtung und Wahrheitof Goethe might be quoted. If it is not a mere fancy to suppose that the individual lives, to some extent at least, in his own self the life of humanity, and therefore to conclude that the childhood of the world can be mirrored in the childhood of a man, a poet like Goethe is precisely fitted, by the record of his own boyhood, to throw light upon the early operations of the human mind. For, in one sense of the term, the mythopœic faculty never dies with poets. In their own persons they prolong the youth and adolescence of the race, retaining the faculty, now lost to nearly all, of looking on the universe as living. Goethe, then, relates that when he was at school at Frankfort, he used to invent stories about himself and the places he frequented, half consciously, and half by a spontaneous working of his fancy. These stories he told to his school-fellows so vividly that they accepted them as fact. "It greatly rejoiced them," he says, "to know that such wonderful things could befall one of their own playmates; nor was it any harm that they did not understand how I could find time and space for such adventures, as they must have been pretty wellaware of all my comings and goings, and how I was occupied the whole day." He goes on to recount one of these marvellous narratives. The scene of it was laid in Frankfort, in a street familiar to his school-fellows. Down this street, which had a long blank wall surmounted by trees, he supposed himself to have been walking one day, and to have found a door in the wall, not noticed by him on any previous occasion. His curiosity being aroused, he knocked at the door, and, after some delay, was admitted. Inside he found a garden full of wonders—fountains and fair nymphs, exotic shrubs and quaint old men, magicians, knights, sylphs, and all the proper furniture of a romance. Goethe's comrades, the first time that they heard him describe this enchanted pleasure-ground in glowing terms, already more than half believed in its existence; "and," says the poet, "each of them visited alone the place, without confiding it to me or to the others, and discovered the nut-trees," but none found the door. Still, they did not disbelieve what Goethe told them, but preferred to imagine that the magic door had once, at least, been seen by him, and opened for him only, though it remained invisible and closed for them. And herein they were literally right, for Goethe trod an enchanted ground of poetry which few can hope to win. The story proved so fascinating that he had to tell it over and over again, always repeating the same order of events, until, he says, "by the uniformity of the narrative I converted the fable into truth in the minds of my hearers."

This, then, may be used as an illustration of the mythopœic faculty. All that was needed for the growth of myths was creative mind on the one side and receptive and believing mind on the other. It did not, probably, require a Goethe to make a myth, though we may still believe that the greatest and best myths owed their form to the intervention at some period of unknown and unacknowledged Goethes. When the logical faculty was inabeyance, when the critical faculty had not been aroused, when sympathy was quick, language fertile, fancy exuberant, and belief sincere, there was nothing to check mythopœtry. The nation had to make the step from boyhood to adolescence before the impulse ceased. Nor was there any education from without in a fixed body of systematized knowledge to coerce its freedom. Forming the first activity of the intellect, it held in solution, as it were, the rudiments of religion and morality, of psychological reflection, of politics, geography, and history. Had there been any one to ask the myth-maker: Who told you this strange tale? what is your authority for imposing it upon us? he would have answered: The goddess told me, the divine daughter of memory, as I walked alone. And this he would sincerely and conscientiously have believed; and those who heard him would have given credence to his words; and thus his intuitions became their intuitions. Creative faculty and credence, insight and sympathy, two forms of the same as yet scarcely divided operation of the mind, gave permanence to myths. What the fathers received they transmitted to their sons. Successive generations dealt freely with them, moulding and remodelling, within the limits set upon the genius of the race. Hundreds may have been produced simultaneously, and among them must have raged a fierce struggle for existence, so that multitudes perished or were hopelessly defaced, just as in the animal and vegetable kingdoms whole species disappear or survive only in fragments and fossils.

It cannot be too often repeated that the power which presided over the transmission of the myths was the spirit of the people. An inherent selective instinct in the nation determined which of them should ultimately survive; and thus a body of legend, truly national, was formed, in which the nation saw itself reflected. When, therefore, we say that Greek mythology is Hellenic and original, we are admitting this unconscious, silent, steady, irresistible faculty of the mind to fashion gods in its own image, to come to a knowledge of itself in its divinities, to create a glorified likeness of all that it admires in its own nature, to deify its truest and its best, and to invest its thought in an imperishable form of art. Nor will it here again avail to demur that Zeus was originally the open sky, Pallas the dawn, Phœbus and Artemis the sun and moon. The student of the Greeks accepts this information placidly and gratefully from the philologer; but he passes immediately beyond it. For him Zeus, Pallas, Phœbus, Artemis are no longer the sky and dawn, the sun and moon. Whatever their origin may have been, the very mythopœic process placed them in quite a different and more important relation to Greek thought when it handed them over to Hesiod and Homer, to Pindar and Æschylus, to Pheidias and Polygnotus.

To discuss the bearings of the linguistic and solar theories of mythology may be reserved for another part of this essay. It is enough, at this point, to bear in mind that there was nothing in the consciousness of the prehistoric Greeks which did not take the form of myth. Consequently their mythology, instead of being a compact system of polytheism, is really a whole mass of thought, belonging to a particular period of human history, when it was impossible to think except by pictures, or to record impressions of the world except in stories. That all these tales are religious or semi-religious—concerned, that is to say, with deities—must be explained by the tendency of mankind at an early period of culture to conceive the powers of nature as persons, and to dignify them with superhuman attributes. To the apprehension of infantine humanity everything is a god. Viewed even as a Pantheon, reduced to rule and order by subsequent reflection, Greek mythology is, therefore, a mass of the most heterogeneous materials. Side by side with some of the sublimest and most beautiful conceptions which the mind has ever produced, we find in it much that is absurd and trivial and revolting. Different ages and conditions of thought have left their products embedded in its strange conglomerate. While it contains fragments of fossilized stories, the meaning of which has either been misunderstood or can only be explained by reference to barbaric customs, it also contains, emergent from the rest and towering above the rubbish, the serene forms of the Olympians. Those furnish the vital and important elements of Greek mythology. To perfect them was the work of poets and sculptors in the brief, bright blooming time of Hellas. Yet, when we pay these deities homage in the temple of the human spirit, let us not forget that they first received form in the mythopœic age—the age of "the disease of language," as Max Müller whimsically states it.

In order to comprehend a problem so complex as that which is offered by mythology, we must not be satisfied with approaching it from one point of view, but must sift opinion, submit our theory to the crucible in more than one experiment, and, after all our labor, be content to find that much remains still unexplained. Therefore, it will not do to accept without further inquiry the general description of the mythopœic faculty which has just been advanced. After examining the various methods which may be adopted for dealing with the myths, and welcoming the light which can be thrown upon the subject from different quarters, it will, perhaps, be possible to return to the original position with a fuller understanding of the problem. If nothing else be gained by this process, it is, at least, useful to be reminded that intricate historical questions cannot be settled by one answer alone; that a variety of agencies must be admitted; and that the domination of a favorite hypothesis is prejudicial to the end which serious inquiry has in view.

Regarding the Greek myths in their totality as a thickly tufted jungle of inexplicable stories, and presupposing the activity of themythopœic faculty to be a play of irrational fancy, it is possible for the political historian to state them as he finds them, and then to pass on and to disregard them. This is, practically speaking, what Grote has done, though the luminous and exhaustive treatment of mythology in his sixteenth chapter proves his complete mastery of the subject from the philosophic point of view. Solely occupied with history, and especially interested in political history, when he has once recognized "the uselessness of digging for a supposed basis of truth" in legends which relate to "a past which was never present," he is justified in leaving them alone. The strong political bias which concentrates attention upon the development of constitutions and the history of states, while it throws the æsthetic activity of the race into the background, sufficiently accounts for this negative relation to the myths. Its value for our purpose consists in the recognition that mythology must not be confounded with history.

Another method of dealing with mythology requires a passing notice, and a brief dismissal. It has not unfrequently been suggested at uncritical periods of culture, and by uncritical minds in our own age, that the Greek myths are the degradation of primitive truth revealed to mankind by God. As they are Christians who advance this view, the essential dogmas of Christianity are sought for in the Greek Pantheon. The three persons of the Trinity, the personality of the devil, the Divine Redeemer, and so forth, are read into the sagas of Kronos and Prometheus and Phœbus. To bring arguments against a theory so visionary, and so devoid of real historical imagination, would be superfluous. Otherwise, it might be questioned how a primitive revelation, after undergoing such complete disintegration and debasement, blossomed forth again into the æsthetical beauty which no one can deny to be the special property of the Greek race. According to the terms of the hypothesis, a primal truth was first degraded, so as to lose its spiritual character; and then, from this corruption of decay, arose a polytheism eminently artistic, which produced works of beauty in their kind unsurpassable, but in their essence diverse from the starting-point of revelation. Moreover, the very dogmas which these visionaries detect in Greek mythology had an historical development posterior to the formation of the Greek Olympus. It was, for instance, the Greek genius in its old age which gave the substantiality of thought to the doctrine of the Trinity. The only good to be got from the consideration of this vain method is the conviction that a problem like that of Greek mythology must be studied in itself and for itself. Whatever its antecedents may have been, its outgrowth in poetry, philosophy, and sculpture—in other words, its realized or permanent manifestation—is not Christian, and has nothing but general human elements in common with Christianity.

A third hypothesis for the explanation of Greek myths, which used to find much favor with the learned, may be stated thus. Myths were originally invented by priests and sages, in order to convey to the popular mind weighty truths and doctrines which could not be communicated in abstract terms to weak intelligences. Thus, each myth was a dark speech uttered in parables. The first fatal objection to this theory is that it does not fulfil its own conditions. To extract a body of doctrine from the vast majority of the myths is not possible. Moreover, it is an inversion of the natural order to assume that priests and sages in a very early age of culture should have been able to arrive at profound truth, and clever enough to clothe it in parable, and yet that, as the nation grew in mental power, the truths should have been forgotten, and the symbols which expressed them have been taken as truth in and for itself. Without, however, entering into a discussion of this hypothesis in detail, it is enough to point out that it implies the same incapacity for realizing the early conditions of societywhich is involved in Locke's and Adam Smith's theory of the Origin of Language. It presupposes fully developed intelligence, whereas we are concerned precisely with the first and germinal commencement of intelligence. At the same time there is a certain foundation for the symbolic theory. Just in the same way as all language is unconsciously metaphorical, so all myths are parabolical, inasmuch as they involve the operation of thought seeking to express itself externally. The mistake lies in maintaining that the parabolic form was deliberately used in the prehistoric period. Its deliberate employment must rather be confined to the age of self-conscious thinking. Thus the myths by which Plato illustrated his philosophy, the Empedoclean parable of Love and Hate, the Choice of Herakles invented by the sophist Prodicus, are purposely symbolical. It is also worth noticing that, among genuine myths, those which seem to justify this hypothesis are of comparatively late origin, or are immediately concerned with psychological questions—such, for example, as the myths of Cupid and Psyche and of Pandora and Epimetheus.

A fourth way of dealing with mythology is to rationalize it, by assuming that all the marvellous stories told about the gods and heroes had historical foundation in the past. Myths, according to this method, become the reminiscences of actual facts, the biographies of persons, which in course of time have lost their positive truth. In order to recover and reconstitute that truth, it is necessary to reduce them to prose. Thus Hecatæus, who was one of the earliest among the Greeks to attempt this interpretation, declared that Geryon was a king of Epirus, and that Cerberus was a serpent haunting the caverns of Cape Tænarus. Herodotus, in like manner, explained the sacred black dove of Dodona by saying that she was a woman, who came from Egyptian Thebes, and introduced a peculiar cult of Zeus into Hellas. After the same fashion, Python, slain by Phœbus, was supposed to have been atroublesome freebooter. Æolus was changed into a weatherwise seaman, the Centaurs into horsemen, Atlas into an astronomer, Herakles into a strong-limbed knight-errant. It was when the old feeling for the myths had died out among the learned, when physical hypotheses were adopted for the explanation of the heavens and the earth instead of the religious belief in nature-deities, and when prose had usurped on poetry, that this theory was worked into a system. Euhemerus, the contemporary of the Macedonian Cassander, wrote a kind of novel in which he made out that all the gods and heroes had once been men. Ennius translated this work into Latin, and the rationalizing method was called Euhemerism. The hold which it has retained upon the minds of succeeding ages is sufficient to show that it readily approves itself to the understanding. It seems to make everything quite smooth and easy. When, for instance, we read the revolting legend of Pasiphaë we like to fancy that after all she only fell in love with a captain called Taurus, and that Dædalus was an artful go-between. Unfortunately, however, there is no guide more delusive than Euhemerism. It destroys the true value of mythology, considered as the expression of primitive thought and fancy, reducing it to a mere decayed and weed-grown ruin of prosaic fact. Plato was right when he refused to rationalize the myths, and when, by his own use of myths, he showed their proper nature as the vehicle for thoughts as yet incapable of more exact expression. At the same time it would be unphilosophical to deny that real persons and actual events have supplied in some cases the subject-matter of mythology. The wanderings of Odysseus, the Trojan War, the voyage of the Argonauts, the kingdom of Minos, the achievements of Herakles, have, all of them, the appearance of dimly preserved or poetized history. Yet to seek to reconstruct history from them, "to dig for a supposed basis of truth" in them, is idle. The real thing to bear in mind is that great menand stirring events must have been remembered even in the mythopœic age, and that to eliminate them from the national consciousness would have been impossible. A nucleus of fact may, therefore, have formed the basis of certain myths, just as a wire immersed in a solution of salts will cause the fluid to condense in crystals round it. But, as in the case just used by way of illustration, we do not see the wire, but the crystals, after the process has been finished, so in mythology it is not the fact but the fancy which attracts our attention and calls for our consideration. This illustration might be extended so as to apply to any substratum, linguistic, solar, symbolical, or other, that may be supposed to underlie the fancy-fabric of mythology. The truth to be looked for in myths is psychological, not historical, æsthetic rather than positive.

In order to make the relation of actuality to imagination in the mythopœic process still more intelligible, another illustration can be drawn from nature. Pearls are said to be the result of a secretion effused from the pearl-oyster round a piece of grit or thorn inserted between its flesh and the shell in which it lives. To the production of the pearl this extraneous object and the irritation which it causes are both necessary; yet the pearl is something in itself quite independent of the stimulating substance. Just so the myth, which corresponds to the pearl, is a secretion of the national imagination which has been roused into activity by something accidental and exterior.

It is possible to take a fifth line and to refer mythology to fetichism. Strictly speaking, fetichism can never explain the problem of the mythopœic faculty, except in so far as we may assume it to have formed a necessary stage of human development anterior to polytheism. Greek mythology, together with Greek nature-worship, would, according to this fifth method of interpretation, have to be regarded as a refinement on the savage dread offetiches. Beginning with a servile prostration before the powers of nature, this attitude of simple awe would have been gradually elevated to the height which it attained in Homer and Hesiod. In the progressive amelioration of the race myths would thus have occupied a middle place between the fetich and the free divinities of art. Putting aside all the difficulties which involve the question whether fetichism is rightly regarded as the first attitude of man towards nature, it is clear that the fetichistic hypothesis cannot cover the whole field of our inquiry. What it does do is to offer an explanation of the origin of nature-worship, and to account for the fact that external objects are regarded as living, sentient beings in the myths. Long before the philosophers of Ionia conjectured that the stars are fiery vapors, people fancied they were gods. It has been well observed that the Greeks never speak of a godof thesun, or a goddessof themoon. They worshipped the sun as a god in Helios, the moon as a goddess in Selene. This direct reference of the mind to natural things as objects of adoration may, possibly, be a purified form of fetichism. But, taken by itself alone, fetichism is not adequate to account for the many-sided, many-featured product of the mythical imagination, which continued active long after the age of savagery. Nor, indeed, have the historians, who attribute great importance to this stage of religious feeling, claimed for it so much.

According to yet a sixth view the myths are to be considered as nothing more or less than poems. This theory is not, at first sight, very different from that which is involved in the first account given of the mythopœic faculty. It is clear that the stories of Galatea, of Pan and Pitys, of Hesperus and Hymenæus, and, in a deeper sense, perhaps, of Prometheus and Pandora, are pure poems. That is to say, the power which produced them was analogous to the power which we observe in poetic creation at the present day, and which has continued the mythopœic age intothe nineteenth century. Yet we should lose a great deal in exactitude and fulness of conception if we identified mythology with poetry. Poetry is conscious of its aim; it demands a fixed form; it knows itself to be an art, and, as an art, to be different from religion and distinguished from history. Now, mythology in its origin was antecedent to all such distinctions, and to all the conscious adaptations of means to ends. Behind the oldest poetry which we possess there looms a background of mythology, substantially existing, already expressed in language, nebulous, potential, containing in itself the germs of all the several productions of the human intellect. The whole intellect is there in embryo; and behind mythology nothing is discoverable but thought and language in the same sphere. Therefore we lose rather than gain by a too strict adherence to what may be termed the poetical hypothesis, although the analogy of poetry, and of poetry alone, places us at the right point of view for comprehending the exercise of the myth-making faculty.

Before completing the circle of inquiry by a return with fuller knowledge to the point from which we started, it is necessary to discuss a seventh way of dealing with the problem, which professes to be alone the truly scientific method. It may be called the linguistic theory, since it rests upon analysis of language, and maintains that mythology is not so much an independent product of the human mind, expressed in words, as a morbid phase of language, considered as a thing apart. Max Müller, who has given currency to this view in England, states expressly that "Mythology, which was the bane of the ancient world, is in truth a disease of language. A myth means a word, but a word which, from being a name or an attribute, has been allowed to assume a more substantial existence;" and again, under mythology "I include every case in which language assumes an independent power and reacts on the mind, instead of being, as it was intended to be, the mererealization and outward embodiment of the mind." The first thing which strikes a student accustomed to regard mythology as a necessary and important phase in the evolution of thought, when he reads these definitions, is the assumption that μῦθος is synonymous with what we mean by word, instead of including the wider content of a story told in words. He is thus led to suspect a theory which contrives to make the problem of mythology pass for a branch of philology. Nor can he comprehend in what sense mythology may be called "a disease of language" rather than a disease of the mind which uses language. Does Max Müller mean that language suffered, or that the thinking subject suffered through the action of the bane? He probably means the former; but, if so, language must be supposed to live a life apart from thought, triumphing over the freedom of the human mind, and imposing its figments on the intellect. Such a belief might seem due partly to a too exclusive study of language in itself, in the course of which the philologer comes to regard it as disconnected from thought, and partly to the neglect of the fact that it is the same human subject which produces language and myths, that language and thought in their origin are inseparable, but that when language has once been started, it has to serve the various purposes of thought, and lend itself to myth and poem, philosophical analysis and religious dogma. Another point to criticise is the inevitable corollary that the soul of a great nation, like the Greeks, for instance, in the course of its advance to the maturity of art and freedom, passes through a period of derangement and disease, by which its civilization is vitiated, its vitality poisoned at the root, and all its subsequent achievements tainted; and that this spiritual phthisis can be traced to a sickly state of language at a very remote historical period when as yet the nation was scarcely constituted. Seriously to entertain this view is tantamount to maintaining that corruption and disease may be the direct efficient causes of the highest art on which humanity can pride itself, since it is indubitable that the poems of Homer and the sculptures of Pheidias are the direct outgrowth of that "bane of the ancient world" which, to quote another pithy saying of Max Müller, convertednominaintonumina. It is hardly necessary to point out the curious want of faith in the Welt-Geist (or God) which this implies; the unimaginative habit of mind we should encourage if we failed to discern the excellence of a civilization that owed its specific character to mythology; the unphilosophical conclusions to which we might be brought if we denied that the intelligence is free while following the fixed laws of its evolution, and that the essential feature in this evolution is the advance from rudimentary to more developed thought. Language, however potent in reaction upon thought, is after all the vehicle and instrument of thought, and not its master. This leads to yet a further criticism: granting that language was "intended to be the mere realization and outward embodiment of the mind"—though this is a wide begging of the most difficult of all questions—it does not follow that in mythology language is not pursuing its appointed function. If the mythological phase of thought is less apparent among the Semitic than among the Aryan nations, are we to say that this is so because the Semitic languages escaped the whooping-cough of mythology, or not far rather because the mind of the Aryan races had a greater aptitude for mythology, a greater aptitude for art? In the fifth place, the definition of mythology is too wide for the special purpose of the problem. Bacon long ago pointed out that one of the chief sources of error arises from our tendency to mistake words for realities. This imperfect adjustment of language to the purposes of thought is not peculiar to the mythopœic age. When we use such phrases as "vital force," we are designating the results of observation and experience by a word which ought not to beregarded as more than a sign. Yet, because "vital force" has sometimes been recognized as something positive and substantially existent, we cannot on that account call it a myth without impoverishing the resources of language, and making one word do the work of two. The truth, therefore, is, that in the mythopœic as in every other age, words have done violence to thought; nor need it be contested that theidola foriwere more potent in the infancy than in the maturity of intelligence. While concerned with this branch of our critique, it is curious to observe the satisfaction with which the advocates of the linguistic theory use it as the means of rehabilitating the moral character of the ancient Greeks, by trying to make out that the tales of Œdipus, Pelops, and Kronos owe their repulsive elements to verbal mistakes. To the student it is undoubtedly a relief to fancy that the incest of Jocasta was originally no more than a figurative way of speaking about the alternations of day and night. He derives, indeed, the same sort of contentment by this method as the rationalist who explains the legend of Pasiphaë upon Euhemeristic principles. Yet it is surely a poor way of whitewashing the imagination of the ancients to have recourse to a theory which sees in myths nothing better than a mange or distemper breaking out in language, and tormenting the human mind for a season. Nor can the theory be stretched so far as to exonerate the nation from its share of interest in these stories. The people who made the supposed linguistic mistakes delighted in the grotesque and fantastic legends which were produced. Even if words deluded them, their wills were free and their brains at work while under the pernicious influence. The real way of exculpating the conscience of the Greeks, indicated both by philosophy and common-sense, is to point out that in the age of reflection the tragic poets moralized these very myths, and made them the subject-matter of the gravest art, while the sages instituted a polemic against the confusion of fabulous mythology with the pure notion of Godhead obtained by reflection.

The theory of development which seems to underlie the linguistic doctrine is, that thought in its earliest stage is positive and clear and adequate. The first savage who thinks sees the sun, for example, and calls it the sun; but in talking about the sun he begins to use figurative language, and so converts his simple propositions into myths. At this point, argues the philologer, he goes wrong and becomes the victim of delusions. The fallacy in this view appears to lie in attributing to the simple and sensuous apprehension of the savage the same sort of simplicity as that which we have gained by a process of abstraction, and consequently inferring that the importation of fancy into the thinking process implies a species of degeneracy. The truth seems rather to be quite the contrary. If we grant, for the sake of argument, that the first thoughts are in a certain sense simple, they have nothing in common with the generalizations of the understanding. Except in relation to immediate perceptions, their generality is empty until it has been filled up with the varied matter of the senses and the imagination. Mythology and poetry are, therefore, an advance upon the primitive prose of simple apprehension. What was a mere round ball becomes a dædal world; and it is not till the full cycle of the myth-creating fancy has been exhausted that the understanding can return upon a higher level by abstraction to intellectual simplicity. The same is true about theology. The first dim sense of the divine in nature as a unity may possibly have been prior to the many deities of polytheism; men may have looked upon the open sky and called that god. Yet it was not a retrogression, but an advance from that first perception to the mythological fulness and variety which gave concreteness to the notion of the deity. In this way the whole content of human nature—feeling, sense, activity, and soforth—was imported into the original and hollow notion; or, to state the process with greater accuracy, the germ of thought, by unfolding its potentiality, showed that what had seemed a barren unit was a complicated organism with a multiplicity of parts. It remained for a further stage of thought, by reflection and abstraction, to return at a higher level to the conception of intellectual unity. What we have to guard against is the temptation to attribute our own abstractedness, the definiteness of positivism, the purity of monotheism, to the first stage of thought. Ours is the triumph of the understanding in its vigor over bewildering fulness; theirs was the poverty and nakedness of a first awakening of intelligence. The same critique might be applied to the theory that language starts with universals. Here, again, all turns upon the question, What sort of universals? Unless we are cautious, we run the risk of ending in a view almost identical with the theory of primitive revelation, by following which to its conclusions we are forced to regard the history of the human race, not as a process of development, but as a series of disastrous errors and of gradual decline.

What remains the solid outcome of the linguistic theory is that in the mythopœic age, when there was no criticism and no reflection possible, theidola foriwere far more powerful than now, and consequently many legends were invented to account for words of which the true meaning had been forgotten. Accordingly philology is one of the keys by which the door of mythology may be unlocked. At the same time, considering the complex relations of thought to language, especially in their commencement, it is wrong to concentrate attention upon language. In like manner, it will be admitted that the genders of the nouns contributed their quota to the personification of female and male deities; but it would be wrong to argue that thenuminawere divided into male and female because thenominawere so distinguished. In orderto appreciate the personifying instinct, we must go back in imagination to a point beyond the divergence of thought and language; and we shall find that if priority can be assigned to either, it will be to thought, as that by which alone the human subject can be said to be. Language has sex because sex is a property of the talking being. The deities are male and female, not because their names have genders, but because the thinking being, for whom sex is all-important, thinks its own conditions into the world outside it.

The linguistic theory for the interpretation of mythology is based upon comparative philology, which has proved beyond all contest that the Aryan races had not only their grammar, but a certain number of their myths in common before the separation of the Hindoo, Hellenic, and Teutonic stocks. The Vedic literature exhibits the mythological material in rudiment, and its style approximates to that of poetry. Hence it has been assumed that the disease of language was less virulent in the oldest Aryan writings than it afterwards became in Hesiod and Homer—thenominahad not as yet been so utterly deformed and corrupted intonumina. The inefficiency of arguments like this is that they have no value except in relation to a previously adopted view. To the opponent of the linguistic as the only scientific method for the explanation of myths, it is left to answer: What you regard as corruption of language I regard as development of thought. What interests me in Greek mythology is precisely this: that the Aryan poems have passed into complicated stories illustrative of pure Hellenic modes of thought and feeling, which in their turn will give occasion for epics, dramas, statues, and philosophies. In the same way, the amount of similarity which comparative mythology has demonstrated in the myths of all the members of the Aryan family is, from the Greek historian's point of view, far less important than their differences. The similarity belongs to thestock as it existed in prehistoric times. The differences mark the external conditions and internal qualities of the nations as they played their part in the world's history. The "disease of language" which severally afflicted the Hindoos, the Persians, the Greeks, and the Scandinavians, turns out to be a faithful mirror of their concrete life. Any one, by way of illustration, can work out the problem of national psychology offered by the nature-worship of the sun in Ormuzd, in Phœbus, and in Balder. The pale and beautiful Balder, who must perish, and whose death involves the world in wailing; the radiant and conquering Phœbus, the healing deity, the purifier, the voice of prophecy and poetry and music; Ormuzd, the antagonist of darkness and of evil, the object of desire and adoration to the virtuous and pure—these sun-gods answer to the races, as their geographical conditions and their spirit made them. Nor is this all. The mythology of each nation has a physiognomy and character of its own—that of the Greeks being clearness and articulation in opposition to the formlessness and misty vagueness of the Hindoos. To mistake a Greek tale of deity or hero for a Hindoo tale of deity or hero is impossible. While the student of prehistorical antiquities will, therefore, direct attention to the likeness revealed by comparative mythology, the historian of nations will rather be attracted by those differences which express themselves in mature art, literature, and religion.[10]

One of the most salient points of similarity between the several families of Aryan myths concerns those which are called solar legends. In all of these we read of children fated to slay their fathers, of strong giants condemned to obey the rule of feeble princes, of heroic young men forced to quit their first love for another woman. The heroes of these stories are marked out in their cradle by miraculous signs and wonders, or are suckled by wild beasts in the absence of their parents; in their youth they slay serpents sent to destroy them; in their manhood they shine forth as conquerors. Their death is not unfrequently caused by slight and unforeseen, though fated, occurrences—by a weapon that strikes the only vulnerable part of their body, in the case of Achilles and Siegfried; by a twig of mistletoe, in the case of Balder; by a thorn, in the case of Isfendiyar; by an envenomed mantle, in the case of Herakles. One great mythus fascinated the imagination of Norsemen and Hindoos, Greek and Persian, German and Roman; interwove itself with their history; gave a form to their poetry; and assumed a prominent place in their religion. So far, it may be said that comparative philology has established something solid, which is at the same time of vast importance for the student of prehistorical antiquity. It is also not improbable that these legends referred originally to the vicissitudes of the sun in his yearly and daily journeys through the heavens. Thus much may be conceded to the solar theorists, remembering always that this primitive astronomical significance, if it existed, was forgotten by the races for whom the myths became the material of poetry and religion. But, unfortunately, the discovery has been strained beyond its proper limits by students who combine a solar theory with the linguistic in their interpretation of mythology. In their hands all the myths are made to refer to the sun and the moon, to dawn and evening. "The difficulty," says Max Müller, "which I myself have most keenly felt is themonotonous character of the dawn and sun legends. Is everything the dawn? is everything the sun? This question I had asked myself many times before it was addressed me by others." How consistently Professor Max Müller found himself obliged to answer this question in the affirmative is known to every student of his works, not to mention those of Mr. Cox. The hand-books of mythology which are now in vogue in England expound this solar theory so persistently that it is probable a race is growing up who fancy that the early Greeks talked with most "damnable iteration" of nothing but the weather, and that their conversation on that fruitful topic fell sick of some disease, breeding the tales of Thebes and Achilles and Pelops's line, as a child breeds measles. It is therefore necessary to subject it to criticism.

The first point for notice is that mythology lends itself almost as well to meteorological as to solar theories. Kuhn and Schwartz, as Professor Müller himself informs us, arrived at the conclusion that "originally the sun was conceived implicitly as a mere accident in the heavenly scenery." Instead, therefore, of finding the sun and the dawn in all the myths, they are always stumbling upon clouds and winds and thunder. This differing of the doctors is, after all, no great matter. Yet it warns us to be careful in adopting so exclusively, as is the present fashion, either the solar or the meteorological hypothesis. A second consideration which inclines to caution is the facility of adapting the solar theory to every story, whether fabulous or historical. In this sense the famous tract which proved that Napoleon the Great only existed in the mythical imagination may be taken as areductio ad absurdumof the method. A third ground for suspension of judgment lies in the very elaborate manipulation which the etymologies of such words as Eros, Erinnys, and the Charites have undergone before they yielded up their solar content. But the multiplication of general objections is not to the present purpose.It is enough to bear in mind that, however important the sun was to the ancient Aryans, he could not have been everything: he was, after all, but one among many objects of interest; and what requires to be still more remembered, is that the Greeks themselves in dealing with the tales of Achilles, or of Kephalos and Prokris, did not know that they were handling solar stories. It is, therefore, misleading to base hand-books which serve as introductions to Greek literature and art upon speculation about the solar groundwork of the myths. In the works of Homer and Hesiod, of Æschylus and Sophocles, the myths were animated with spiritual, intellectual, and moral life. To draw the lessons from them which those poets drew, to demonstrate the grandeur of the imagination which could deal with those primeval tragic tales, should be the object of the educator; not to fill his pages with extremely doubtful matter about sun and dawnad infinitum. The true relation of the solar theory to a Greek myth may be illustrated by the tale of Herakles, whom the Greeks themselves may perhaps have recognized as a solar deity, since Herodotus identified him with a Phœnician god.[11]We are therefore justified in dealing with this hero as a personification of the sun. Herakles is the child of Zeus. He strangles in his cradle the serpents of the night. He loves Iole, or the violet-colored clouds of dawn. He performs twelve labors, corresponding to the twelve months of the solar year. He dies of a poisoned robe amid flames that may be taken for the blood-red sunset clouds. The maiden Iole, now evening and not morning, visits him again in death; and he ascends from his funeral pyre of empurpled mountain peaks to heaven. Let all this be granted. So far the solar theory carries us. But is this all? In other words, is this, which the current hand-books tell us about Herakles, the pith of the matter as it appeared to the Greeks? When we turn to thePhilosophyof Historyof Hegel, who worked by another than the solar method, and was more anxious to discover thoughts than etymologies, we read: "Hercules is among the Hellenes that spiritual humanity which, by native energy, attains Olympus through the twelve far-famed labors; but the foreign idea that lies at the basis is the sun completing its revolution through the twelve signs of the Zodiac." Here we touch the truth. The solar foundation of the mythus is wholly valueless and unimportant—in other words, is alien to its essence, when compared with the moral import it acquired among the Greeks. It is the conception of life-long service to duty, of strength combined with patience, of glory followed at the cost of ease, of godhead achieved by manhood through arduous endeavor—it is this that is really vital in the myth of Herakles. By right of this the legend entered the sphere of religion and of art. In this spirit the sophist enlarged upon it, when he told how Herakles in his youth chose virtue with toil rather than pleasure, incorporating thus the high morality of Hesiod with the mythical element. If myths like these are in any sense diseased words about the sun, we must go further and call them immortalized words, words that have attained eternal significance by dying of the disease that afflicted them. The same remarks apply to all the solar and lunar stories—to Achilles, Endymion, Kephalos, and all the rest. As solar myths these tales had died to the Greeks. As poems, highly capable of artistic treatment, in sculpture, or in verse, pregnant with humanity, fit to form the subject of dramatic presentation or ethical debate, they retained incalculable value. The soul of the nation was in them. And that is their value for us.

To deny the important part which the sun, like the earth or the sea, played in early mythology would be absurd. To dispute the illumination which comparative philology has thrown not only upon the problem of the myths, but also upon the earlyunity of races until recently divided in our thought, would be still more ridiculous. The point at issue is simply this, that in Greek mythology there is far more than linguistic and solar theories can explain, and thatmoreis precisely the Greek genius. The philologer from his point of view is justified in directing attention to the verbal husk of myths; but the student of art and literature must keep steadily in view the kernel of thought and feeling which the myths contain. It is only by so doing that the poetry and art which sprang from them can be intelligently studied. Thus the modern text-books of mythology are misleading, in so far as they draw the learner's mind away from subjects of historical importance to bare archæology.

As the result of analysis, the following propositions may be advanced. In the earliest ages the races to whom we owe languages and literature and art possessed a faculty which may be called the mythopœic, now almost wholly extinct, or rather superseded by the exercise of other faculties which it contained in embryo. The operation of this faculty was analogous to that of the poetic; that is to say, it was guided by the imagination more than by the dry light of the understanding, and its creative energy varied in proportion to the imaginative vigor of the race which exercised it. The distinction here introduced is all-important; for only thus can we explain the very different nature of the Greek and Roman religions. The tendency to personification which distinguishes mythology was due to the instinct of uncivilized humanity to impute to external objects a consciousness similar to that by which men are governed—in other words, to regard them as living agents with wills and passions like our own. If fetichism be the rudimentary phase of this instinct, polytheism indicates an advance by which the mind has passed from the mere recognition of spiritual power in nature to the investment of that power with personal and corporeal qualities. Butjust as the imagination varies in degree and force in different races, so will this power of carrying the personifying instinct onward into art be found to vary. The Romans stopped short at allegories; in other words, they did not carry their personification beyond the first stage. The Greeks created divine personalities. Many myths contain moral and philosophical ideas conveyed in parables, and some of them have indubitable reference to real events and persons. But in no case of a primitive and genuine mythus are we to expect deliberate fiction or conscious symbolism, or, again, to seek for a discoverable substratum of solid fact. Entering the sphere of mythology, facts become etherealized into fancies, the actual value of which lies in the expression of the national mind, so that mythical and spiritual are in this respect synonymous. To use a metaphor, a myth is a Brocken-spectre of the thought which produced it, and owes the features by which we can distinguish it to the specific character of the people among whom it sprang into existence. The analysis of language shows that the whole Aryan family held a great number of their myths in common, that many legends are stories told to account for words and phrases which had lost their original significance, and that in these stories the alternations of night and day and the procession of the seasons played a very important part. Philology can, however, furnish no more than the prolegomena to mythology. After hearing its report, the student of Greek art and literature must take the Greek myths at a Greek valuation—must consider what they were for the Athenians, for example, and not what they had once been. Finally, it may be remembered that to hope for a complete elucidation of a problem so far removed from observation and experiment would be vain. The conditions of the mythopœic age cannot be reconstituted; and were they to reappear through the destruction of civilizations, the reflective understanding would not be present to examine and record them.

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