Among Famous Books | Page 4

suggested by the
mysterious and protean characteristics of water. It is very natural that
this should be so, and every one who has ever felt the power of the sun
in the East will sympathise with Turner's dying words, "The sun, he is
God."
As a key to mythology this theory was especially associated with the
name of Plutarch among ancient writers, and it has been accepted more
or less completely by a vast number of moderns. In the late Sir George
Cox's fascinating stories it was run to utter absurdity. The story is
beautifully told in every case, and when we have enjoyed it and felt
something of the exquisiteness of the conception and of the variety and
range of thought exhibited in the fertile minds of those who had first
told it, Sir George Cox draws us back sharply to the assertion that all
we have been hearing really meant another phase of sunset or sunrise,
until we absolutely rebel and protest that the effect is unaccountable
upon so meagre a cause. It is an easy method of dealing with folk-lore.
If you take the rhyme of Mary and her little lamb, and call Mary the
sun and the lamb the moon, you will achieve astonishing results, both
in religion and astronomy, when you find that the lamb followed Mary
to school one day. This nature element, however, had undoubtedly a
very considerable part in the origin of myths, and when Max Müller
combines it with philology it opens a vast field of extraordinarily

interesting interpretations resting upon words and their changes.
A further theory of myths is that which regards them as the stories of
races told as if they had been the lives of individuals. This, as is well
known, has had permanent effects upon the interpretation not only of
Greek but of Hebrew ancient writings, and it throws light upon some of
those chapters of Genesis which, without it, are but strings of forgotten
and unpronounceable names.
But beyond all such explanations, after we have allowed for them in
every possible way, there remains a conviction that behind these
fascinating stories there is a certain irreducible remainder of actual fact.
Individual historic figures, seen through the mists of time, walk before
our eyes in the dawn. Long before history was written men lived and
did striking deeds. Heroic memories and traditions of such
distinguished men passed in the form of fireside tales from one
generation to another through many centuries. Now they come to us,
doubtless hugely exaggerated and so far away from their originals as to
be unrecognisable, and yet, after all, based upon things that happened.
For the stories have living touches in them which put blood into the
glorious and ghostly figures, and when we come upon a piece of
genuine human nature there is no possibility of mistaking it. This thing
has been born, not manufactured: nor has any portrait that is lifelike
been drawn without some model. Thus, through all the mist and haze of
the past, we see men and women walking in the twilight--dim and
uncertain forms indeed, yet stately and heroic.
Now all this has a bearing upon the main subject of our present study.
Meteorology and astronomy are indeed noble sciences, but the proper
study of mankind is man. While, no doubt, the sources of all early
folk-lore are composite, yet it matters greatly for the student of these
things whether the beginnings of religious thought were merely in the
clouds, or whether they had their roots in the same earth whereon we
live and labour. The heroes and great people of the early days are
eternal figures, because each new generation gives them a resurrection
in its own life and experience. They have eternal human meanings,
beneath whatever pageantry of sun and stars the ancient heroes passed

from birth to death. Soon everything of them is forgotten except the
ideas about human life for which they stand. Then each of them
becomes the expression of a thought common to humanity, and
therefore secure of its immortality to the end of time; for the undying
interest is the human interest, and all ideas which concern the life of
man are immortal while man's race lasts. In the case of such legends as
those we are discussing, it is probable that beyond the mere story some
such ideal of human life was suggested from the very first. Certainly, as
time went on, the ideal became so identified with the hero, that to
thoughtful men he came to stand for a particular idealism of human
experience. Thus Pater speaks of Dionysus as from first to last a type of
second birth, opening up the hope of a possible analogy between the
resurrections of nature and something else, reserved for human