Among Famous Books | Page 5

souls.
"The beautiful, weeping creatures, vexed by the wind, suffering, torn to
pieces, and rejuvenescent again at last, like a tender shoot of living
green out of the hardness and stony darkness of the earth, becomes an
emblem or ideal of chastening and purification, and of final victory
through suffering." This theory would also explain the fact that one
nation's myths are not only similar to, but to a large extent practically
identical with, those of other nations. There is a common stock of ideas
supplied by the common elements of human nature in all lands and
times; and these, when finely expressed, produce a common fund of
ideals which will appeal to the majority of the human race.
Thus mythology was originally simple storytelling. But men, even in
the telling of the story, began to find meanings for it beyond the mere
narration of events; and thus there arose in connection with all stories
that were early told, a certain number of judgments of what was high
and admirable in human nature. These were not grounded upon
philosophical or scientific bases, but upon the bed-rock of man's
experience. Out of these judgments there grew the great ideals which
from first to last have commanded the spirit of man.
In this connection it is interesting to remember that in Homer the men
were regarded as the means of revealing ideas and characters, and not
as mere natural objects in themselves. The things among which they
lived are described and known by their appearances; the men are

known by their words and deeds. "There is no inventory of the features
of men, or of fair women, as there is in the Greek poets of the decline
or in modern novels. Man is something different from a curious bit of
workmanship that delights the eye. He is a 'speaker of words and a doer
of deeds,' and his true delineation is in speech and action, in thought
and emotion." Thus, from the first, ideas are the central and important
element. They spring from and cling to stories of individual human
lives, and the finest of them become ideals handed down for the
guidance of the future race. The myths, with their stories of gods and
men, and their implied or declared religious doctrines, are but the forms
in which these ideals find expression. The ideals remain, but the forms
of their expression change, advancing from cruder to finer and from
more fanciful to more exactly true, with the advance of thought and
culture. Meanwhile, the ideals are above the world,--dwelling, like
Plato's, in heaven,--and there are always two alternatives for every man.
He may go back either with deliberate intellectual assent, or passion-led
in sensual moods, to the powers of nature and the actual human stories
in their crude and earthly form; or he may follow the idealisation of
human experience, and discover and adopt the ideals of which the
earthly stories and the nature processes are but shadows and hints. In
the former case he will be a pagan; in the latter, a spiritual idealist. In
what remains of this lecture, we shall consider four of the most famous
Greek legends--those of Prometheus, Medusa, Orpheus, and Apollo--in
the light of what has just been stated.
Prometheus, in the early story, is a Titan, who in the heavenly war had
fought on the side of Zeus. It is, however, through the medium of the
later story that Prometheus has exercised his eternal influence upon the
thought of men. In this form of the legend he appears constantly living
and striving for man's sake as the foe of God. We hear of him making
men and women of clay and animating them with celestial fire,
teaching them the arts of agriculture, the taming of horses, and the uses
of plants. Again we hear of Zeus, wearied with the race of men--the
new divinity making a clean sweep, and wishing to begin with better
material. Zeus is the lover of strength and the despiser of weakness, and
from the earth with its weak and pitiful mortals he takes away the gift
of fire, leaving them to perish of cold and helplessness. Then it is that

Prometheus climbs to heaven, steals back the fire in his hollow cane,
and brings it down to earth again. For this benefaction to the despised
race Zeus has him crucified, fixed for thirty thousand years on a rock in
the Asian Caucasus, where, until Herakles comes to deliver him, the
vulture preys upon his liver.
Such a story tempts the allegorist, and indeed the main drift of its
meaning is unmistakable. Cornutus, a contemporary of Christ,
explained it "of forethought, the quick inventiveness of human thought
chained to the painful necessities of human life, its liver gnawed
unceasingly by cares." In