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BOOK
I.

The infancy of mankind,

Earliest condition

of thought and its

conse

quences.

CHAPTER III.

THE SOURCE OF MYTHICAL SPEECH.

IF the analysis of language and the researches of antiquarians bring before us, in the earliest annals of mankind, a state of society which bears to our own a resemblance not greater than that of infancy to mature manhood, we shall scarcely realise that primæval condition of thought except by studying closely the mind of children. Stubborn facts disclose as the prominent characteristics of that early time the selfishness and violence, the cruelty and slavishness of savages; yet the mode in which they regarded the external world became a source of inexhaustible beauty, a fountain of the most exquisite and touching poetry. So true to nature and so lovely are the forms into which their language passed, as they spoke of the manifold phases of the changing year; so deep is the tenderness with which they describe the death of the sun-stricken dew, the brief career of the short-lived sun, and the agony of the earth-mother mourning for her summer-child, that we are tempted to reflect back upon the speakers the purity and truthfulness of their words. If the theory of a corrupted revelation as the origin of mythology imputes to whole nations a gross and wilful profanity which consciously travesties the holiest things, the simplicity of thought which belongs to the earliest myths presents, as some have urged, a picture of primæval humanity too fair and flattering.

No deep insight into the language and ways of children is needed to dispel such a fancy as this. The child who will speak of the dawn and the twilight as the Achaian spoke of Prokris and Eôs will also be cruel or false or cunning. There is no reason why man in his earliest state should not express his sorrow when the bright being who had gladdened him with his radiance dies in the evening, or feel a real joy when he rises again in the morning, and yet be selfish or oppressive or cruel in his dealings with his fellows. His mental condition determined the character of his language, and that con

THE MYTHOPOEIC STAGE OF LANGUAGE.

dition exhibits in him, as in children now, the working of a feeling which endows all outward things with a life not unlike his own. Of the several objects which met his eye he had no positive knowledge, whether of their origin, their nature, or their properties. But he had life, and therefore all things else must have life also. He was under no necessity of personifying them, for he had for himself no distinctions between consciousness and personality. He knew nothing of the conditions of his own life or of any other, and therefore all things on the earth or in the heavens were invested with the same vague idea of existence. The sun, the moon, the stars, the ground on which he trod, the clouds, storms, and lightnings were all living beings; could he help thinking that, like himself, they were conscious beings also? His very words would, by an inevitable necessity,' express this conviction. His language would admit no single expression from which the attribute of life was excluded, while it would vary the forms of that life with unerring instinct. Every object would be a living reality, and every word a speaking picture. For him there would be no bare recurrence of days and seasons, but each morning the dawn would drive her bright flocks to the blue pastures of heaven before the birth of the lord of day from the toiling womb of night. Round the living progress of the new-born sun there would be grouped a lavish imagery, expressive of the most intense sympathy with what we term the operation of material forces, and not less expressive of the utter absence of even the faintest knowledge. Life would be an alternation of joy and sorrow, of terror and relief; for every evening the dawn would return leading her bright flocks, and the short-lived sun would die. Years might pass, or ages, before his rising again would establish even the weakest analogy; but in the meanwhile man would mourn for

1 I should wish to place, if possible, a stronger stress on these words now than when I wrote them some twelve

or thirteen years ago. Professor Max Müller has well said that on the question, whether the growth of myths be inevitable or not, the whole problem of mythology seems to turn, and therefore that the certainty of the result cannot be too strongly insisted on. Mythology thus becomes "an inherent necessity of language," and is, "in fact, the dark shadow which language throws on thought, and which can never disappear till language becomes altogether commensurate with thought, which it never will." Mythology, then, in its highest sense is strictly "the power

exercised by language on thought in
every possible sphere of mental activity."
It follows, of course, that the history of
philosophy is the history of a long battle
with mythology, in which the victory
of thought belongs still to "the distant
future."-Selected Essays, i. 590-591.

Tylor, Primitive Culture, i. 268.

In spite of the incredulity which one or two critics have expressed for this assertion, I see no reason for qualifying a proposition for which we have abundant evidence. See Max Müller, Selected Essays, i. 600. But even after the analogy had been established, and a sense of order had been impressed upon the mind, it was this very order which was regarded with

CHAP.

III.

21

BOOK

I.

Primary myths.

For every

his death, as for the loss of one who might never return.
aspect of the material world he would have ready some life-giving
expression; and those aspects would be scarcely less varied than
his words. The same object would at different times, or under
different conditions, awaken the most opposite or inconsistent con-
ceptions. But these conceptions and the words which expressed
them would exist side by side without producing the slightest con-
sciousness of their incongruity; nor is it easy to determine the exact
order in which they might arise. The sun would awaken both
mournful and inspiriting ideas, ideas of victory and defeat, of toil
and premature death. He would be the Titan, strangling the
serpents of the night before he drove his chariot up the sky; and
he would also be the being who, worn down by unwilling labour
undergone for men, sinks wearied into the arms of the mother who
bare him in the morning. Other images would not be wanting; the
dawn and the dew and the violet clouds would be not less real and
living than the sun. In his rising from the east he would quit the
fair dawn, whom he should see no more till his labour drew towards
its close. And not less would he love and be loved by the dew
and by the morning herself, while to both his life would be fatal
as his fiery car rose higher in the sky. So would man speak of all
other things also; of the thunder and the earthquake and the storm,
not less than of summer and winter. But it would be no personifi-
cation, and still less would it be an allegory or metaphor. It would
be to him a veritable reality, which he examined and analysed as
little as he reflected on himself. It would be a sentiment and a belief,
but in no sense a religion.

In these spontaneous utterances of thoughts awakened by outward phenomena, we have the source of the myths which must be regarded as primary. But it is obvious that such myths would be produced only so long as the words employed were used in their original meaning. While men were conscious of describing only the departure of the sun when they said "Endymion sleeps," the myth had not passed beyond its first stage; but if once the meaning of the word were either in part or wholly forgotten, the creation of a new personality under this name would become inevitable, and the change would be rendered both more certain and more rapid by the very wealth of words which they lavished on the sights and objects which most impressed their imagination. A thousand phrases

profound and reverent awe and admira-
tion. The state of mind which can see
signs and wonders only in what is

irregular belongs, as Professor Müller has remarked, to a later time.

THE PHENOMENA OF THE DAY.

III.

23

would be used to describe the action of the beneficent or consuming CHAP. sun, of the gentle or awful night, of the playful or furious wind: and every word or phrase became the germ of a new story, as soon as the mind lost its hold on the original force of the name.1

Thus in the Polyonymy which was the result of the earliest form Secondary of human thought, we have the germ of the great epics of later myths. times, and of the countless legends which make up the rich stores of mythical tradition. There was no bound or limit to the images suggested by the sun in his ever varying aspects; and for every one of these aspects they would have a fitting expression, nor could human memory retain the exact meaning of all these phrases when the men who used them had been scattered from their original home. Old epithets would now become the names of new beings, and the legends so framed would constitute the class of secondary myths. But in all this there would be no disease of language. The failure would be that of memory alone,-a failure inevitable, yet not to be regretted, when we think of the rich harvest of beauty which the poets of many ages and many lands have reaped from these halfremembered words.2

It mattered little, then, of what object and phenomenon they Polyonomight happen to speak. It might be the soft morning light or the my, as af fecting the fearful storm-cloud, the wind or the thunder. In each case there growth of mythowould be Polyonymy, the employment of many names to denote the logy. same thing. In each case, their words would express truthfully the

"That Titanic assurance with which we say, the sun must rise, was unknown to the early worshippers of nature, or if they also began to feel the regularity with which the sun and the other stars perform their daily labour, they still thought of free beings kept in temporary servitude, chained for a time, and bound to obey a higher will, but sure to rise, like Herakles, to a higher glory at the end of their labours."Max Müller, "Comparative Mythology," Chips, &c., ii. 96.

2 In his Lectures on Language, second series, 358, Professor Max Müller asserts that "whenever any word, that was at first new metaphorically, is new without a clear conception of the steps that led to its original metaphorical meaning, there is danger of mythology; whenever those steps are forgotten and artificial steps put in their places, we have mythology, or, if I may say so, we have diseased language, whether that language refers to religious or secular interests." The mythology thus produced

Ce

he terms the bane of antiquity. This
view is opposed by M. Baudry in his
able paper, De l'Interprétation Mytholo
gique. After quoting the sentence just
cited, he adds, " Voilà le langage accusé
de maladie et de révolte, fort injuste-
ment à notre avis, car la faute n'est
qu'aux défaillances de la mémoire, qui
a gardé le mot mais oublié le sens.
mal arrive tantôt pour un mot, tantôt
pour une figure symbolique dont on a
perdu la clef. Mais parce qu'une re-
présentation mal comprise d'un évêque
debout devant des catéchumènes plongés
dans la cuve baptismale a donné lieu à
la légende de saint Nicholas ressuscitant
les enfants, en faut-il conclure aussi que
la sculpture était malade?" But after
all there is no real antagonism between
the view taken by Professor Max Müller
and that of M. Baudry. With the
former, mythology arises when the steps
which led to a metaphor are in greater
or less degree forgotten; in other words,
from a failure of memory, not from dis-
ease in language.

I.

BOOK impressions which the phenomena left on their senses, and their truthfulness would impart to their language an undying beauty; but the most fruitful source of mythical phrases would be found undoubtedly in the daily or yearly course of the lord of day. In the thought of these early ages the sun was the child of night, or darkness; the dawn came before he was born, and died as he rose in the heavens. He strangled the serpents of the night; he went forth like a bridegroom out of his chamber, and like a giant to run his course. He had to do battle with clouds and storms. Sometimes his light grew dim under their gloomy veil, and the children of men shuddered at the wrath of the hidden sun. Sometimes his ray broke forth only, after brief splendour, to sink beneath a deeper darkness; sometimes he burst forth at the end of his course, trampling on the clouds which had dimmed his brilliancy and bathing his pathway with blood. Sometimes, beneath mountains of clouds and vapours, he plunged into the leaden sea. Sometimes he looked benignly on the face of his mother or his bride who came to greet him at his journey's end. Sometimes he was the lord of heaven and of light, irresistible in his divine strength; sometimes he toiled for others, not for himself, in a hard, unwilling servitude. His light and heat might give life or destroy it. His chariot might scorch the regions over which it passed; his flaming fire might burn up all who dared to look with prying eyes into his dazzling treasure-house. He might be the child destined to slay his parents, or to be united at the last in an unspeakable peace to the bright dawn who for brief space had gladdened his path in the morning. He might be the friend of the children of men, and the remorseless foe of those powers of darkness who had stolen away his bride. He might be a warrior whose eye strikes terror into his enemies, or a wise chieftain skilled in deep and hidden knowledge. Sometimes he might appear as a glorious being doomed to an early death, which no power could avert or delay. Sometimes grievous hardships and desperate conflicts might be followed by a longer season of serene repose. Wherever he went, men might welcome him in love, or shrink from him in fear and anguish. He would have many brides in many lands, and his offspring would assume aspects beautiful, strange, or horrible. His course might be brilliant and beneficent, or gloomy, sullen, and capricious. As compelled to toil for others, he would be said to fight in quarrels not his own; or he might for a time withhold the aid of an arm which no enemy could withstand. He might be the destroyer of all whom he loved, he might slay the dawn with his kindling rays, he might scorch the fruits who were his children; he

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