Royal Institution of Great Britain. WEEKLY EVENING MEETING, Friday, April 8, 1870. SIR HENRY HOLLAND, Bart. M.D. D.C.L. F.R.S. President, PROFESSOR HUXLEY, F.R.S. On the Pedigree of the Horse. WEEKLY EVENING MEETING, Friday, April 29, 1870. SIR HENRY HOLLAND, Bart. M.D. D.C.L. F.R.S. President, PROFESSOR J. S. BLACKIE, F.R.S.E. On Scientific Method in the Interpretation of Popular Myths, with special reference to Greek Mythology. THERE is perhaps no subject of great known interest and deep philosophical significance which has been so much neglected by British scholars as Mythology. We have scarcely half-a-dozen books to show on the subject; and of these the most notable and the most original, that of Bryant, found on the shelves of most good English libraries, is, with all its merits, after all only a grand chase in the dark, with a few bright flashes of discovery and happy gleams of suggestion by the way. Payne Knight's treatise on Ancient Symbolism contains many just and admirable observations; but it does not pretend to be a systematic treatise on Hellenic mythology. Recently the subject has been taken up by the subtle and versatile intellect of Mr. Gladstone; and German notions have been poured in upon us wholesale under the masterly manipulation of Max Müller. But the onesidedness and inadequacy of most of these recent attempts plainly indicate that we are as yet only in the first stage of a really scientific treatment of myths, and that a considerable amount of fervid speculation on the subject will require to have spent its young force before the foundations of any stable doctrine on the subject shall be laid. The fact seems to be that the English mind, so great in practical matters, in certain interesting fields of speculation presents VOL. VI. (No. 53.) K almost a total blank; and when at length questions of deep human significance belonging to these fields are raised, our lethargic intellect, awakened out of a long slumber, unable at first to discern between truth and falsehood in a strange element, is dazzled and stimulated into a transcendental admiration of the first new idea, through the instrumentality of which it has found the delight of a new consciousness. In these circumstances it may not be without profit to take a cool survey of the ground; and, if nothing better, at least to furnish young adventurers in this field with a few cautions that may save them from repeating in another form the adventurous Quixotism and brilliant blunders of Jacob Bryant. For the sake of distinctness, I will state what I have to say on this subject in a series of propositions. I. The Greek mythology in its main points and prominent features was the product of a vivid imagination and a subtle fancy, acted upon and reacting on the great forms and forces of the external world and the mysterious Powers of the inner world in such a manner as, according to the natural laws of imaginative activity, to create a beautiful procession of divine personages and divine actions, framed after the similitude of human persons and human actions. In other words, Greek mythology is a religion and a poetry of nature, or a highly poetical anthropomorphic physico-theology. This proposition I state as one which may be called broadly the general result of the researches of the distinguished band of mythological students in Germany, from Heyne to Welcker, Hartung, and Max Müller, whose erudite labours have so cast into the shade the feeble glimmerings of light that could be gathered from our somewhat narrow and arid school of native scholarship. It is a proposition resting on a wide induction, and applicable not to Greek mythology only, but, in a greater or less degree, to the mythology of all peoples who have not sunk into a state of utterly gross and embruted existence. It is a proposition also from which Mr. Gladstone, who has a special theory as to the origin of certain of the persons in the Greek Pantheon, will not withhold his general assent. Let us see, therefore, what elements, according to this view, the theological myths of the Greeks ought to contain. Now here it is plain that those objects of external nature which are most striking in their presentation and most potent in their influences, would in the first place be subjected to the transmuting action of a vivid and reverential fancy in the early races of mankind; and these objects, of course, are the heavens, the earth, the sun, the moon, the stars, the ocean, the rivers, the generative and procreative virtue, and the underground world with the powers of darkness and of death. But man is not, even in his lowest stage (whatever the French Helvetius and certain of his English disciples may conceit themselves), a creature of mere sensations, made up wholly, to use Hume's language, of impressions from without. In his lowest stage, he has passions, feelings, sentiments, ideas, and thoughts, of which, though the occasion be sensuous and external, the real spring is mental and internal; and accordingly, unless we suppose him by some awful calamity cut short in his rational development and reduced to a mere animal, his imagination, acting upon the invisible Powers of the world within, will create impersonations of these powers, after a fashion similar to the anthropomorphic transformations produced by the same magic touch in the external world. The only difference here may likely be, as in the formation of language, that, instead of creating different gods to represent the inward mysteries, the mind, which always works by analogies, will superadd a mental significance to some impersonated power of the external world previously formed, and thus recognize the outward and the inward as fundamentally one. This process, however, does not seem absolutely necessary, as it is quite possible that powerful passions, and visible aspects of passion— such as PAVOR and PALLOR, in Livy (I. 27)-may assume directly the anthropomorphic attitude, without any external inoculation. In this view, I cannot but regard it as a mistaken view of Max Müller to presume as a matter of course that Erinnys, or the Fury, must be identified with some goddess of the external world. The account of Pausanias (VIII., 25, 6), according to which this terrible impersonation of conscience, or the violated moral law, is derived from givvés, an old Greek verb originally signifying to be angry, has sufficient probability, not to mention the obvious analogy of Agai, another name sometimes given to the awful Maids (reuvai), from apá, an imprecation (Eschyl., Eumen.'). IL. In order to discover what particular form, force, or power of Nature, or the inner man, is represented by any figure in a mythological procession, the first thing to be done is to bring the special figure with all its symbolical accompaniments, and in all its traditional completeness of aspect and attitude face to face with Nature; and then proceed, in obedience to the natural action of a reverential and poetical imagination, to identify the sign with the thing signified, and cause the god anew to leap as it were directly out of nature, and assume a human shape before a human imagination. Those who wish to see how this may be done, may consult the wellknown passage descriptive of the origin of Greek mythology in the fourth book of Wordsworth's "Excursion." Here the poet of the mountains, the woods, and the floods, sets himself to re-create the figures of the Greek gods from the living environment of woods, mountains, and floods out of which they arose; and there can be no doubt that this process of re-creation of a lost nature-worship is scientifically legitimate. "Omnis scriptura sacra," says Thomas à Kempis, "eo spiritu legi debet quo scripta est ;" and in the same way the signature of a religion of nature in an anthropomorphic theology can be understood only by a mind contemplating nature under the same conditions and influences that were present when the theology was formed. It is only, therefore, from the combined action of poetry, piety, and philosophy-such as existed in the soul of Wordsworth-that a recovery of the significance of the symbolic representations of a religion of nature is to be looked for; mere science will not suffice, and the most extensive and curious erudition can only supply the materials of the reconstruction, not assist in the architecture. These materials are of the utmost consequence; otherwise (like Ruskin*) we shall be amusing ourselves, building an imaginary palace in the air for the habitation of an imaginary queen of the air. They must be collected also with great care and labour from many curious and remote sources; for we must not imagine that any secular poet-even Homer, much less such a luxuriant fancy-monger as Ovid-can supply us on all occasions with the true character and significance of some of the most important personages in the motley Greek Pantheon. The Greek religion, like the Greek people, was tribal and local to a degree which we moderns, with our one Catholic Church, may find it difficult to realize; but a few very superficial glances into the pages of Pausanias, or a slight acquaintance with the Vase Chamber of the British Museum, will teach the mythologic student how little Homer and Hesiod, notwithstanding the eulogy of Herodotus (II. 53), can be looked on as the complete Bible of early Hellenic theology. Extensive and wellsifted Greek learning will, therefore, on all occasions be necessary before a successful solution of any of the more difficult problems of Greek mythology can be attempted; and of this sort of learning the works of Ottfried Müller, Welcker, and other distinguished German writers, furnish us with abundant stores, if we only had the chaste imagination and the sober sense to make a good use of them. III. In determining the character of a mythological personage reference may always be had to the etymology of the name, and the significance of the epithets; but this is an instrument which a wise man will employ with the most jealous caution, and always as an adminicle of evidence only, never as the foundation of an argument. It is needless for those who are in the slightest degree acquainted with works on mythology, to recall what wild work has been habitually played with this potent wand of learned harlequins. In the hands of a Bryant of the last century, or an Inman of the present, etymology, as a manipulator of myths, is no wise interpreter, much less an infallible oracle, but only a clever juggler. A Celt, it has been said, whenever he meddles with etymology, becomes mad; and this witness, I am sorry to say, is in no small degree true; but even under the scientific guidance of a Bopp, a Pott, a Grimm, and a Müller, a sober man may sometimes even in the full blaze of the new Sun of comparative philology, allow himself to drink deep draughts, if not of maundering madness, at least of manifest hallucination. For in the hot chase after facts to illustrate a favourite theory learned men do not always sufficiently consider that the original form of these venerable old names (without which etymology is mere guessing) may be lost, and is not now recoverable; further, that two or three different interpreta *The Queen of the Air,' by John Ruskin. 1869. tions, all according to philological laws quite legitimate, may be equally plausible; and, if the etymology is sought for, not in the native tongue, but in some foreign dialect, such as Hebrew, Sanscrit, or Coptic, the danger of slippery transmutations and conjectural illusion is of course increased tenfold. IV. The general statement in the first proposition leaves the question still open, whether, granting the principal personages in the Hellenic Pantheon are mere impersonated elements of Nature, there may not also be found in the wide and various range of mythological tradition some decidedly historical element. The answer to this question plainly is, that such an element is by all means to be presumed in all collections of popular traditions; and the burden of proof, as the lawyers say, lies clearly with whosoever asserts the contrary. In reference to this point, the cool way in which Max Müller and his English disciple, Mr. Cox, assume that there are no human figures and historical characters in the whole gallery of heroes and demigods in the Greek mythology, is something very remarkable. The idea that any people which, in its earliest history, possessed an age of great men and heroes, should systematically blot out the memory of all this very substantial company, and substitute in their place a floating conglomerate of mere crystallized epithets of forgotten and humanized types of degraded gods, is so manifestly improbable, that one is set seriously to fish out some secret and concealed cause of so startling an effect. Nor is the cause far to seek. This extravagant application of the doctrine of Euhemerus-whose heresy consisted only in his assigning a human origin to Jove and the other great gods-is to be traced to a peculiar idiosyncrasy of the German people, who, from the earliest germ of their great scholarship, have shown an instinctive aversion to external facts, and an extravagant passion for self-evolved ideas. To suppose that Achilles was merely what he appears to be, a Thessalian captain, to the German mind appears a prosaic proposition, altogether beneath the notice of the eagle-flight of their transcendental imagination. He must be a water-god, or a sun-god, or the human representative of whatever theological idea the necessities of a despotic system may require. In England such an aversion to the recognition of fact in tradition is quite a recent phenomenon, and takes its rise, not from a ripe judgment and a sober conviction, but merely as an extreme reaction against the old historical school of Clinton, and the stout English realists of the last century. In Porson's day it was the fashion to laugh at the Germans, their philosophies, their principles, their ideas, their symbols, and even their doctrine of metres; but now we have got a new light, and with the known zeal of green converts, we are ready to receive passively and swear to the mere nonsense of those very men, whose sense, only a few years ago, we were too ignorant and too insolent to recognize. This state of affairs in one section of our intellectual world is certainly not one of which John Bull has reason to be proud. We find him passing |