*

Art. 6. THE GROWTH OF MYTHOLOGICAL STUDY. THE object of this lecture is to offer a general view-or rather my own view, whether it be true to nature or not of a particular province of historical criticism as applied to the facts of mythology and religion. I intend to deal here with ideas rather than with individuals. Many scholars who have a right to figure even in a short history of mythological exegesis must perforce remain unmentioned. I shall endeavour to make my way through the wood without numbering the trees; the reader will excuse me if he does not hear from me about all the books and all the men who have contributed to our knowledge of religions and elevated it to its actual standard as a recognised province of scholarship.

Mythological exegesis became a necessity, not a scientific but an ethical necessity, the day when the more highly-developed Greeks began to perceive the conflict between some of their inherited myths-the puerile ones —and the higher moral idea which they had gradually evolved concerning the Godhead. At that period, about 600 B.C., myths were already old and had been sung by a host of poets, epic and lyric. Some philosophers were what we should call radicals; they upbraided Homer and Hesiod for having invented or recited falsehoods, and simply discarded the myths as rubbish. But such a course could not find many followers, owing to the high authority of the poets and the perpetual commemoration of the myths in religious ritual. So their successors-I mean the Pagan philosophers during ten centuries or more-resorted to two conciliatory systems, one of which treated myths as allegorical, while the other gave them an historical basis. Allegory, as the word shows, is nothing but a distorted and indirect manner of stating truths, whether moral or physical. Using allegory to explain a myth means transforming that myth into an apologue—ὁ μύθος δήλοι ὅτι κ.τ.λ.—which is always supposed to prove something. The historical or pragmatic method starts from the assumption that a myth is a real story adorned with adventitious embellishments. It is generally called Euhemerism, from the name of Euhe

* Delivered at Girton College, Cambridge, Aug, 3, 1911,

merus, the writer of a semi-historical and semi-fantastical novel in the first part of the third century B.C. But this designation is no less unjust than the name given to America, which ought to be Columbia. Many thinkers before Euhemerus, among others Euripides and Plato, sought to explain myths in the same way.

Both these methods are radically wrong, because they completely ignore the conditions under which myths originate and develope, and because the worst way of explaining a myth is to put aside its mythical character. Let me give an example to make myself fully understood. According to an old Greek legend, King Akrisios, of Argos, had been warned by an oracle that his grandson would kill him. As he had an only daughter, Danaé, he shut her up in a tower with a small opening at the top, and decided that she should never be married. But Zeus fell in love with the girl, entered the tower in the shape of a shower of gold, and begot the famous hero Perseus.

Now a Greek, perceiving that the conduct of Jove was unworthy of a respectable god, could find two principal ways of overcoming the moral difficulty. First, using the allegorical system, he might say that the golden rain of Jupiter typified the sun's rays, and go on to dilate on the fertilising power of the radiant king of day. He might also explain the myth as an allegory of the power of gold, to which men's hearts and even stone walls are not impervious. Drawing a lesson from a myth and explaining a myth are two quite different things; but the ancients, and also many moderns, have overlooked this.

The other method, the historical or euhemeristic, was still easier to handle. What the poets recited about Zeus and Danaé had really occurred; but the hero of the adventure had been a man, not a god, and he had not taken the form of a golden shower. It was simply the story of some hero of old who had entered the dwelling of princess Danaé by dint of munificence; freely using a purse full of gold, he had tipped the porter, the housekeeper and the maids. Resorting to such a method, you not only destroy the poetry, but substitute for it a wretched platitude; you suppress the myth, and do not create history in its stead. It is perfectly true that legends develope about historical persons, even nowa

days; Napoleon and Garibaldi have their legends. But such legends, added to or substituted for history, are always imitations of earlier legends; and these you can never hope to elucidate by disentangling and brushing away the supposed mythical elements which they contain.

Now you may ask: But what would be your explanation of the legend? Well, I can tell you, having already published it. In many parts of the Balkan peninsula, and also in Germany, when peasants are afflicted by a long period of drought, they take a girl, strip her naked, and pour water upon her head; it is a ceremony of sympathetic magic, wherewith they hope to obtain good rain by giving a forcible example to the reluctant sky. Danaé, in Greek, means dry; so I believe that the girl was treated as the Danaé, the dry earth, and that the water shed upon her was called the golden rain, on account of the fertilising powers ascribed to it. The ritual in due time gave rise to a myth, a process common enough, but one of which nobody had a clear notion, before the last century. Again, Why a tower? you will ask. Well, because a literary myth like that of Perseus is a concoction of many different myths strung together by some ingenious poet, not necessarily by the people taken as a whole. There is an old and widely circulated story about the fair one in the tower,' 'la belle dans la tour'; there are also many stories, collected by Mr Sidney Hartland, about supernatural births; there are others about kings or other prominent men who forbid their daughters to marry, etc. Many elements of that venerable folk-lore, which is even older than the oldest literature, appear together in a myth like that of the birth of Perseus. So you see my explanation is by no means a simple one; but, whether true or not, it explains something and does justice to the mythical character of the legend. Nowadays nobody would consent even to discuss the allegorical or historical explanations offered of this myth; scholars would rather say that they can find no good explanation, which is another manner of proving that mythological exegesis has definitely outgrown its childish stage.

When the Christians began to upbraid the Pagans for the moral looseness of their myths, the pseudo-historical system was in full sway. The Fathers said to the

Pagans, 'Your gods were rascals and your goddesses something worse.' In answer to this, many Pagans renounced Euhemerism, and had recourse to allegory, though with small success, because Christian writers justly objected that allegory may help you out of any difficulty. All through the Middle Ages Euhemerism prevailed, together with another idea which already occurs among Alexandrine Jewish writers, to the effect that the Pagans had borrowed their legends from Holy Scripture, but had disfigured and distorted their borrowings by reason of the malicious influence of the demons. So it seemed perfectly clear that the legend of Herakles was nothing but a silly plagiarism of the story of Samson. The men of the Renaissance adopted with great enthusiasm the allegorical method, which had prevailed among the neo-platonic philosophers in the later centuries of paganism. Indeed, allegory, under different names, such as symbolism, has continued to the present day, not precisely as a system, but as a tendency or a make-shift.

Who was the first to teach common sense? This is very difficult to answer. Almost all sensible ideas have been put forward a great many times before finding an audience; the same may be said of many practical ideas, that is to say, inventions which have contributed to better the condition of mankind. But beneficent ideas do not produce good results before they have been taken up and systematically developed by a man of science, patience and literary ability. We know, for instance, that the idea of totemism, which has played such an important part in modern mythological exegesis, was familiar to Garcilasso della Vega at the end of the sixteenth century, and also to the French missionary Lafitau in the early years of the eighteenth. It is, indeed, very interesting to observe that Lafitau even conceived the idea that totemism might explain some things in Greek mythology. But who revealed the importance of totemism before MacLennan? Discovering a nugget is one thing, and working a gold-mine is another. Many travellers have discovered nuggets before they thought of exploiting a mine.

I believe one of the first to sink shafts and dig trenches in the rich strata of myths and religions was a somewhat versatile Frenchman, Fontenelle, the nephew of the great

Corneille, who wrote tragedies, poetry, excellent biographies of savants, etc., and, among other short essays, a very remarkable one on the origin of myths. The more important passages of that memoir have been translated by Mr Andrew Lang in an appendix to his wellknown work, 'Myth, Ritual and Religion.' Why, asks Fontenelle, are so many Greek myths absurd? Because they are inherited from people in the same state of savagery as the Kaffirs and Iroquois, among whom similar myths prevail. That answer, a real flash of genius, laid the foundation of the whole anthropological school of mythology. Not only did Fontenelle recognise that myths are survivals of a more ancient and barbarous state of things, but he divined the real comparative method, which consists in seeking for information and parallels among savages when you wish to explain something that looks savage in civilised societies or literature. He perceived, though his knowledge of ethnology was but slight, the world-wide similarity of myths, and ascribed this to the similarity of human beings at a certain stage of their intellectual development. Fontenelle went so far as to compare the myths of America with those of Greece, concluding that the American Indians might have become as sensible as the Greeks if they had only been allowed sufficient time. He also mentions the borrowing of myths; in short, he fully justifies Mr Lang's saying: The followers of E. B. Tylor, Mannhardt, Gaidoz and the rest, do not seem to be aware that they are only repeating the notions of the nephew of Corneille. Please mark that Mr Lang spoke of the 'followers' of the scholars whose names he quotes; at least one of these, M. Gaidoz, was fully aware, so early as 1877, that his opinion had been anticipated by his great countryman.*

* An important point is the date of Fontenelle's essay. Mr Lang quotes it from the edition of the Œuvres Complètes,' published in 1758; Fontenelle, born in 1657, died in 1757, at the ripe age of 99 years. Now I have reason to believe that Fontenelle wrote his epoch-making essay between 1687 and 1691, almost the very year when Bossuet celebrated in his high-flown biblical language the virtues of the Prince de Condé. The essay was published later, but it is really interesting to note that it belongs not to the eighteenth century, as has been generally believed, but to the seventeenth. This enhances the merit of the writer and the historical importance of his short memoir.