BOOK only until some one should sing more sweetly and powerfully than II. The Piper of Hameln. The Erlking. they. This mysterious spell belongs also to the Piper of Hameln, who, wroth at being cheated of his promised recompense for piping away into the Weser the rats which had plagued the city,' returns to take an unlooked-for vengeance. No sooner is a note of his music heard than there is throughout the town a sound of pattering feet, all the children of the town hurrying to listen to the strange melody. The musician goes before them to a hill rising above the Weser, and as they follow him into a cavern, the door in the mountain-side shuts fast, and their happy voices are heard no more. According to one version none were saved but a lame boy, who remained sad and cheerless because he could not see the beautiful land to which the piper had said that he was leading them. At Brandenburg the plague from which the piper delivers the people is a host of ants, whom he charms into the water. The promised payment is not made, and when he came again, all the pigs followed him into the lake—a touch borrowed probably from the narrative of the miracle at Gadara. In this myth there is a triple series of incidents. Failing to receive his recompense the second year for sweeping away a cloud of crickets, the piper takes away all their ships. In the third year all the children vanish as from Hameln, the unpaid toil of the piper having been this time expended in driving away a legion of rats. The idea of music as charming away souls from earth is common to all these legends, and this notion is brought out more fully not only in Göthe's ballad of the Erlking, who charms the child to death in his father's arms, but also in superstitions still prevalent among certain classes of people in this country, who believe that the dying hear the sound of sweet music discoursing to them of the happy land far away. The idea of the shrubs and trees as moved by the harping of 1 This tale at once carries us to the Sminthian worship of Apollon. Sminthos, it is said, was a Cretan word for a mouse, and certain it is that a mouse was placed at the foot of the statues of the sun-god in the temples where he was worshipped under this name. But the story accounted for this by saying that the mouse was endowed with the gift of prophecy, and was therefore put by the side of the deity who was possessed of the profound wisdom of Zeus himself. This in the opinion of Welcker is a mere inversion, which assigned to the mouse an attribute which had belonged exclu sively to the god near whom it was placed; accordingly he refers the myth without hesitation to Apollon as the deliverer from those plagues of mice which have been dreaded or hated as a terrible scourge, and which even now draw German peasants in crowds to the churches to fall on their knees and pray God to destroy the mice.-Griechische Götterlehre, i. 482. But the Hindu Ganesa, as well as the Hellenic Apollón, is represented as crushing the mouse.Gubernatis, Zoological Mythology, ii. 68. 2 Gould, Curious Myths, second series, 160. THE MAGIC LYRE. V. among the 463 Orpheus has run out into strange forms. In some myths, the CHAP. musician who compels all to dance at his will is endowed with the The Jew thievish ways of Hermes, although these again are attributed to an honest servant who at the end of three years receives three farthings thorns. as his recompense. In the German story of the Jew among the Thorns the servant gives these farthings to a dwarf who grants him three wishes in return. The first two wishes are, of course, for a weapon that shall strike down all it aims at, and a fiddle that shall make every one dance, while by the third he obtains the power of forcing every one to comply with any request that he may make. From this point the story turns more on the Homeric than on the Orphic myth. Strangely enough, Phoibos is here metamorphosed into the Jew, who is robbed not of cows but of a bird, and made to dance until his clothes are all torn to shreds. The appeal to a judge and the trial, with the shifty excuses, the dismissal of the plea, and the sentence, follow in their due order. But just as Hermes delivers himself by waking the sweet music of his lyre when Phoibos on discovering the skins of the slaughtered cattle is about to slay him, so the servant at the gallows makes his request to be allowed to play one more tune, when judge, hangman, accuser, and spectators all join in the magic dance. Another modern turn is given to the legend when the Jew is made to confess that he had stolen the money which he gave the honest servant, and is himself hanged in the servant's stead.1 of Arion. In a less developed form this story is the same as the legend of The story Arion, who, though supposed to be the friend of the Corinthian tyrant Periandros, is still represented as a son of Poseidôn. In this case the musician's harp fails to win his life at the hands of the men who grudge him his wealth; but his wish seems to carry with it a power which they are not able to resist, while his playing brings to the side of the ship a dolphin who bears Arion on his back to Corinth. In the trial which follows, the tables are turned on the sailors much as they are on the Jew in the German story, and Arîon recovers his harp which was to play an important part in many another Aryan myth. The German form of the myth has been traced into Iceland, Inchanted harps and where Sigurd's harp in the hands of Bosi makes chairs and tables, horns. kings and courtiers, leap and reel, until all fall down from sheer weariness and Bosi makes off with 1 This marvellous piper reappears in Grimm's stories of the Wonderful Musician, of Roland who makes the witch dance against her will to a bewitched his bride who was about to be tune, and of the Valiant Tailor who II. BOOK given to some one else. The horn of Oberon in the romance of Huon of Bordeaux has the same powers, while it further becomes, like the Sangreal, a test of good and evil, for only those of blameless character dance when its strains are heard. Still more marvellous are the properties of the lyre of Glenkundie : The harp of Wäinä möinen. He'd harpit a fish out o' saut water, Or water out o' a stane, Or milk out o' a maiden's breast That bairn had never nane.' The instrument reappears in the pipe of the Irish Maurice Connor, “Wäinämöinen went to a waterfall and killed a pike which swam below it. Of the bones of this fish he constructed a harp, just as Hermes made his lyre of the tortoiseshell. But he dropped this instrument into the sea, and thus it fell into the power of the seagods, which accounts for the music of the ocean on the beach. The hero then made another from the forest wood, and with it descended to Pohjola, the realm of darkness, in quest of the mystic Sampo, just 1 Jamieson's Scottish Ballads, i. 98; Price, Intred, to Warten's Hist. Eng. Poetry, Ixiv. Curicus Myths, ii. 160. THE EASTERN AND WESTERN SIBYLS. as in the classic myth Orpheus went down to Hades to bring thence Eurydice. When in the realm of gloom perpetual, the Finn demigod struck his kantele and sent all the inhabitants of Pohjola to sleep, as Hermes when about to steal Iô made the eyes of Argos Panoptes close at the sound of his lyre. Then he ran off with the Sampo, and had nearly got it to the land of light when the dwellers in Pohjola awoke, and pursued and fought him for the ravished treasure, which, in the struggle, fell into the sea and was lost; again reminding us of the classic tale of Orpheus." "1 465 CHAP. V. Wuotan again in the Teutonic mythology is Galdner the singer: Galdner the Singer. and in the Gudrunlied the time which it would take one to ride a thousand miles passed in a moment while any one listened to the singing of Hjarrandi. The christianised form of this myth, as the Legend of the Monk and the Bird, is well known to the readers of Longfellow and Archbishop Trench, and is noteworthy chiefly as inverting the parts, and making the bird charm the wearied and doubting man. Still more remarkable is the connexion of this mystic harp in The Sibyl. the legend of Gunâdhya with a myth which reproduces that of the Sibylline books offered in diminished quantities, but always at the same price, to the Roman king Tarquin. In the Eastern tale the part of Tarquin is played by King Sâtavâhana to whom Gunâdhya sends a poem of seven hundred thousand slokas written in his own blood. This poem the king rejects as being written in the Pisâcha dialect. Gunâdhya then burns a portion of the poem on the top of a mountain; but while it is being consumed, his song brings together all the beasts of the forest who weep for joy at the beauty of his tale. The king falls ill, and is told that he must eat game: but none is to be had, for all the beasts are listening to Gunâdhya. On hearing this news, the king hastens to the spot and buys the poem, or rather the seventh portion which now alone remained of the whole. It is scarcely necessary to add that in this tale, as in that of Wäinämöinen, we have two stories which must be traced to a common source with the myths of Hermes, Orpheus, and the Sibyl,-in other words, to a story the framework of which had been put together before the separation of the Aryan tribes.3 1 Curious Myths, ii. 177. Katha Sarit Sagara, i. 8; Gould, Curious Myths, ii. 172. BOOK The song of the breeze in the reeds. Pan, the purifying breeze. SECTION IV.—PAN. To The harp of Orpheus and the lyre of Hermes are but other forms of the reed pipe of Pan. Of the real meaning of this name the Western poets were utterly unconscious. In the Homeric Hymn he is said to be so called because all the gods were cheered by his music' Still through all the grotesque and uncouth details of the myth, which tells us of his goat's feet and horns, his noisy laughter and capricious action, the idea of wind is pre-eminent. It is the notion not so much of the soft and lulling strains of Hermes in his gentler mood, or of the irresistible power of the harp of Orpheus, as of the purifying breezes which blow gently or strong, for a long or a little while, waking the echoes now here now there, in defiance of all plan or system, and with a wantonness which baffles all human powers of calculation. this idea the Homeric Hymn adheres with a singular fidelity, as it tells us how he wanders sometimes on the mountain summits, sometimes plunging into the thickets of the glen, sometimes by the stream side or up the towering crags, or singing among the reeds at eventide. So swift is his pace that the birds of the air cannot pass him by. With him play the water-maidens, and the patter of the nymphs' feet is heard as they join in his song by the side of the dark fountain. Like Hermes again and Sarameya, he is the child of the dawn and the morning, and it is his wont to lie down at noontide in a slumber from which he takes it ill if he be rudely roused. Of his parentage we have many stories, but the same notion underlies them all. Sometimes, as in the Homeric Hymn, he is the son of Hermes and of the nymph Dryops, sometimes of Hermes and Penelopê, sometimes of Penelopê and Odysseus; but Penelopê is the bride of the toiling sun, who is parted from her whether at morning or eventide, and to be her son is to be the child of Saramâ. Nor is the idea changed if he be spoken of as the son of heaven and earth (Ouranos and Gaia), or of air and water (Aithêr and a Nereid). Pan then is strictly the purifying breeze, the Sanskrit pavana,' a name which reappears in the Latin Favonius, and perhaps also in Faunus; and his real character, as the god of the gentler winds, is brought out most prominently in the story of his love for Pitys, and of the jealousy of the blustering Boreas, who hurled the maiden from a rock and changed her into a pine-tree. The myth explains itself. Hymn to Pan, 47. 2 lb. 7-20. 3 Theok. vii. 107. Max Müller, Chips, ii. 159. In |