The Homeric Hymns | Page 5

rely on his own literary taste.
According to that criterion, I think we probably have in the Hymn the
work of a good poet, in the early part; and in the latter part, or second
Hymn, the work of a bad poet, selecting unmanageable passages of
myth, and handling them pedantically and ill. At all events we have
here work visibly third rate, which cannot be said, in my poor opinion,
about the immense mass of the Iliad and Odyssey. The great
Alexandrian critics did not use the Hymns as illustrative material in
their discussion of Homer. Their instinct was correct, and we must not
start the consideration of the Homeric question from these much
neglected pieces. We must not study obscurum per obscurius. The
genius of the Epic soars high above such myths as those about Pytho,
Typhaon, and the Apollo who is alternately a dolphin and a meteor:
soars high above pedantry and bad etymology. In the Epics we breathe
a purer air.
Descending, as it did, from the mythology of savages, the mythic store
of Greece was rich in legends such as we find among the lowest races.
Homer usually ignores them: Hesiod and the authors of the Hymns are
less noble in their selections.
For this reason and for many others, we regard the Hymns, on the
whole, as post-Homeric, while their collector, by inserting the Hymn to
Ares, shows little proof of discrimination. Only the methods of modern
German scholars, such as Wilamowitz Mollendorf, and of Englishmen
like Mr. Walter Leaf, can find in the Epics marks of such confusion,
dislocation, and interpolations as confront us in the Hymn to Apollo. (I
may refer to my work, "Homer and the Epic," for a defence of the unity
of Iliad and Odyssey.) For example, Mr. Verrall certainly makes it
highly probable that the Pythian Hymn, at least in its concluding words
of the God, is not earlier than the sixth century. But no proof of
anything like this force is brought against the antiquity of the Iliad or

Odyssey.
As to the myths in the Hymns, I would naturally study them from the
standpoint of anthropology, and in the light of comparison of the
legends of much more backward peoples than the Greeks. But that light
at present is for me broken and confused.
I have been led to conclusions varying from those of such students as
Mr. Tylor and Mr. Spencer, and these conclusions should be stated,
before they are applied to the Myth of Apollo. I am not inclined, like
them, to accept "Animism," or "The Ghost Theory," as the master-key
to the origin of religion, though Animism is a great tributary stream. To
myself it now appears that among the lowest known races we find
present a fluid mass of beliefs both high and low, from the belief in a
moral creative being, a judge of men, to the pettiest fable which
envisages him as a medicine-man, or even as a beast or bird. In my
opinion the higher belief may very well be the earlier. While I can
discern the processes by which the lower myths were evolved, and
were attached to a worthier pre-existing creed, I cannot see how, if the
lower faiths came first, the higher faith was ever evolved out of them
by very backward savages.
On the other side, in the case of Australia, Mr. Tylor writes: "For a long
time after Captain Cook's visit, the information as to native religious
ideas is of the scantiest." This was inevitable, for our information has
only been obtained with the utmost difficulty, and under promises of
secrecy, by later inquirers who had entirely won the confidence of the
natives, and had been initiated into their Mysteries. Mr. Tylor goes on
in the same sentence: "But, since the period of European colonists and
missionaries, a crowd of alleged native names for the Supreme Deity
and a great Evil Deity have been recorded, which, if really of native
origin, would show the despised black fellow as in possession of
theological generalisations as to the formation and conservation of the
universe, and the nature of good and evil, comparable with those of his
white supplanter in the land." {23a} Mr. Tylor then proceeds to argue
that these ideas have been borrowed from missionaries. I have tried to
reply to this argument by proving, for example, that the name of

Baiame, one of these deities, could not have been borrowed (as Mr.
Tylor seems inclined to hold) from a missionary tract published sixteen
years after we first hear of Baiame, who, again, was certainly dominant
before the arrival of missionaries. I have adduced other arguments of
the same tendency, and I will add that the earliest English explorers and
missionaries in Virginia and New England (1586-1622)