No More Learning

]
Camille - Yes, Perdican, we love each other! Let me feel it
on your heart.
The God who sees us will not be angry: he
wills that I should love you; he has known it these fifteen years.
Perdican-Dearest being, you are mine! [He kisses her; a
shriek is heard from behind the altar. ]
Camille- My foster-sister's voice!
Perdican How came she here? I left her on the staircase
when you sent for me. She must have followed me without my
knowledge.
Camille - Come this way: the cry came from here.
Perdican What do I fear? my hands seem bathed in blood.
Camille - The poor child must have overheard us, and she
has fainted again: come and help her! Ah, it is all too cruel!
Perdican-No, I cannot go,—I am numb with mortal terror.
Go, Camille, and try to help her. [Exit Camille. ] O God, I
beseech thee, make me not a murderer! Thou seest our hearts:
we are two senseless children who have been playing with life
and death. God of justice, do not let Rosette die! I will find
her a husband, I will repair the evil I have done; - she is
young, she shall be rich and happy. Oh, do not refuse me
this, my God! thou canst bless four of thy children! [Re-enter
Camille. ] Well, Camille?
Camille-She is dead. Farewell, Perdican.
-
―
-
From Selections from the Prose and Poetry of Alfred de Musset,' Copy-
right 1870, by Hurd & Houghton


## p. 10506 (#378) ##########################################

10506
ALFRED DE MUSSET
VERGISS MEIN NICHT
R
EMEMBER! when the morn with sweet affright
Opens her portals to the king of day;
Remember! when the melancholy night
All silver-veiled pursues her darkling way;
Or when thy pulses wake at pleasure's tone:
When twilight shades to gentle dreams invite,
List to a voice which from the forest lone
Murmurs, Remember!
Remember! When inexorable fate
Hath parted finally my lot from thine,
When absence, grief, and time have laid their weight
With crushing power on this heart of mine,—
Think of my love, think of my last farewell;
Absence nor time can constancy abate:
While my heart beats, its every throb shall tell,
Remember!
Remember! When beneath the chilling ground
My weary heart has found a lasting sleep,
And when in after time, above the mound,
The pale blue flower its gentle watch doth keep,—
I shall not see thee more; but ever nigh,
Like sister true my soul will hover round:
List to a voice which through the night will sigh,
Remember!
From Selections from the Prose and Poetry of Alfred de Musset. '
right 1870, by Hurd & Houghton
FROM TO A COMRADE›
THE
HE joy of meeting makes us love farewell;
We gather once again around the hearth,
And thou wilt tell
All that thy keen experience has been
Of pleasure, danger, misadventure, mirth,
And unforeseen.
And all without an angry word the while,
Or self-compassion,- naught dost thou recall
Save for a smile;
Copy-


## p. 10507 (#379) ##########################################

ALFRED DE MUSSET
Thou knowest how to lend good fortune grace,
And how to mock what'er ill luck befall
With laughing face.
But friend, go not again so far away;
In need of some small help I always stand,
Come whatso may;
I know not whither leads this path of mine,
But I can tread it better when my hand
Is clasped in thine.
FROM ON A SLAB OF ROSE MARBLE'
ET, despite myself, I trow
Other destiny was thine:
Far away from cloudy France,
Where a warmer sun doth shine,
YET
Near some temple, Greek or Latin;
The fair daughters of the clime,
With the scent of heath and thyme
Clinging to their sandaled feet
Beating thee in rhythmic dance,
Were a burden far more sweet
Than court ladies shod with satin.
Could it be for this alone
Nature formed thee in the earth,
In whose beauteous virgin stone
Genius might have wrought a birth
Every age had joyed to own?
•
•
There should have come forth of thee
Some new-born divinity.
When the marble-cutters hewed
Through thy noble block their way,
They broke in with footsteps rude
Where a Venus sleeping lay,
And the goddess's wounded veins
Colored thee with roseate stains.
Alas! and must we hold it truth
That every rare and precious thing
Flung forth at random without ruth
Trodden under foot may lie?
The crag where, in sublime repose,
The eagle stoops to rest his wing,
10507


## p. 10508 (#380) ##########################################

10508
ALFRED DE MUSSET
OFT
No less than any wayside rose,
Dropped in the common dust to die?
Can the mother of us all
Leave her work, to fullness brought,
Lost in the gulf of chance to fall,
As oblivion swallows thought?
Torn away from ocean's rim
To be fashioned by a whim,
Does the briny tempest whirl
To the workman's feet the pearl?
Shall the vulgar, idle crowd
For all ages be allowed
To degrade earth's choicest treasure
At the arbitrary pleasure
Of a mason or a churl?
FROM THE WILD MARE IN THE DESERT›
FT in the waste, the Arab mare untamed,
After three days' wild course awaits the storm
To drain the rain-drops from the thirsty palms;
The sun is leaden, and the silent palms
Droop their long tresses 'neath a fiery sky.
She seeks her well amid the boundless wilds:
The sun has dried it; on the burning rock
Lie shaggy lions growling low in sleep.
Her forces fail; her bleeding nostrils wide
Plunge eager in the sand,- the thirsty sand
Drinks greedily her life's discolored stream.
Then stretches she at length, her great eyes film,
And the wan desert rolls upon its child
In silent folds its ever moving shroud.
She knew not, she, that when the caravan
With all its camels passed beneath the planes,
That, would she follow, bowing her proud neck,
In Bagdad she would find cool stable-stalls,
With gilded mangers, dewy clover turf,
And wells whose depths have never seen the sky.


## p. 10509 (#381) ##########################################

ALFRED DE MUSSET
10509
TO PÉPA
ÉPA! when the night has come,
And mamma has bid good-night,
By thy light, half-clad and dumb,
As thou kneelest out of sight;
PEPAA
Laid by, cap and sweeping vest
Ere thou sinkest to repose,
At the hour when half at rest
Folds thy soul as folds a rose;
When sweet Sleep, the sovereign mild,
Peace to all the house has brought,-
Pépita! my charming child!
What, oh, what is then thy thought?
Who knows? Haply dreamest thou
Of some lady doomed to sigh;
All that Hope a truth deems now,
All that Truth shall prove, a lie.
Haply of those mountains grand
That produce-alas! but mice;
Castles in Spain; a prince's hand;
Bon-bons, lovers, or cream-ice.
Haply of soft whispers breathed
'Mid the mazes of a ball;
Robes, or flowers, or hair enwreathed;
Me; or nothing, dear! at all.
-
A
JUANA
GAIN I see you, ah, my queen,-
Of all my old loves that have been,
The first love and the tenderest;
Do you remember or forget —
Ah me, for I remember yet-
How the last summer days were blest?
Ah, lady, when we think of this,-
The foolish hours of youth and bliss,
How fleet, how sweet, how hard to hold!


## p. 10510 (#382) ##########################################

ALFRED DE MUSSET
10510
How old we are, ere spring be green!
You touch the limit of eighteen,
And I am twenty winters old.
My rose, that mid the red roses
Was brightest, ah, how pale she is!
Yet keeps the beauty of her prime;
Child, never Spanish lady's face
Was lovely with so wild a grace;
Remember the dead summer-time.
Think of our loves, our feuds of old,
And how you gave your chain of gold
To me for a peace-offering;
And how all night I lay awake
To touch and kiss it for your sake,-
To touch and kiss the lifeless thing.
Lady, beware, for all we say,
This Love shall live another day,
Awakened from his deathly sleep:
The heart that once has been your shrine
For other loves is too divine;
A home, my dear, too wide and deep.
What did I say - why do I dream?
Why should I struggle with the stream
Whose waves return not any day?
Close heart, and eyes, and arms from me;
Farewell, farewell! so must it be,
So runs, so runs, the world away.
The season bears upon its wing
The swallows and the songs of spring,
And days that were, and days that flit:
The loved lost hours are far away;
And hope and fame are scattered spray
For me, that gave you love a day,
For you that not remember it.
Translation of Andrew Lang.


## p. 10511 (#383) ##########################################

10511
FREDERIC WILLIAM HENRY MYERS
(1843-)
M
UCH of what is most subtle and penetrative in contempo-
rary English criticism is embodied in the writings of certain
men of letters whose names are familiar only to a special
and limited circle. Frederic W. H. Myers is one of those critics
whose work, while not in any sense popular, obtains well-established
recognition for its literary finish, and pre-eminently for its originality
and suggestiveness. The complex forces of the end of the century
inay not be favorable to the production of creative genius, but they
are favorable to the birth and growth of a sensitive critical spirit.
Mr. Myers's Modern and Classical Essays are the work of one to
whom the revelations of science in all its branches have been a
source of enlightenment on subjects with which it would seem that
science primarily had nothing to do. He is of the number of those
who would wed the materialistic knowledge of the age to an ideal-
ism the more intense because it is denied the outlet of a definite
religious faith. He would judge of literature, of personality, of the
various phenomena of his own and of a past age, by the new lights
of science, and at the same time by the light that never was on
sea or land. It is this combination of the idealistic with the exact
spirit which gives to the essays of Mr. Myers their peculiar charm,
and which fits him to write with such exquisite appreciation of Mar-
cus Aurelius and Virgil, of Rossetti and George Eliot. In his heart
he has all the romance of a poet,- his desire to live by admiration,
hope, and love, his sensitiveness to the beautiful, his passionate belief
in the soul and its great destinies; but his brain rules his heart with
typical modern caution. In his efforts to reconcile these elements in
his nature, Mr. Myers has infused into his essays, whatever their sub-
jects, the speculative thought of his generation concerning the unseen.
world and man's relation to it; and especially of that great question
of personal immortality, which forever haunts and forever baffles the
minds of men. He is drawn naturally to a consideration of such men
as Marcus Aurelius. The fitful dejection of the philosophic emperor,
his resolve to learn and to endure, his hopeless hope, his calm in
the face of the veil which cuts man off from the paradise of certain-
ties, seem to Mr. Myers to prefigure the attitude of the modern mind
toward its mysterious environment. Yet he himself has gone beyond
the negativity of Stoicism. He believes that love is the gateway to


## p. 10512 (#384) ##########################################

10512
FREDERIC WILLIAM HENRY MYERS
the unseen universe, being of those who, "while accepting to the full
the methods and the results of science, will not yet surrender the
ancient hopes of the race. "
In 'Modern Poets and Cosmic Law' he traces the influence of Ten-
nyson and Wordsworth on modern religious thought; a regenerating
influence, because they have realized "with extraordinary intuition,"
and promulgated "with commanding genius, the interpenetration of
the spiritual and the material world. " Mr. Myers's deep sympathy
with Wordsworth is completely expressed in his luminous biography
of the poet. His sympathy with George Eliot is less keen, or rather
it is less that of the mind than of the heart. His depression in the
presence of her hopelessness is well described in the essay of which
she is the subject:-
"I remember how, at Cambridge, I walked with her once in the Fellows'
Garden of Trinity, on an evening of rainy May; and she, stirred somewhat
beyond her wont, and taking as her text the three words which have been
used so often as the inspiring trumpet-calls of men,- the words God, Immor-
tality, Duty,- pronounced with terrible earnestness how inconceivable was
the first, how unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute
the third. Never, perhaps, have sterner accents affirmed the sovereignty of
impersonal and unrecompensing law. I listened, and night fell; her grave,
majestic countenance turned towards me like a Sibyl's in the gloom; it was
as though she withdrew from my grasp, one by one, the two scrolls of prom-
ise, and left me the third scroll only, awful with inevitable fates. »
Mr. Myers's essays on Science and a Future Life,' on 'Darwin and
Agnosticism,' on Tennyson as a Prophet,' on 'A New Eirenicon,'
on Modern Poets and Cosmic Law,' are concerned chiefly with
the modern answers to the old eternal problems. Even his essays
on Mazzini, on George Sand, on Renan, and on the present political
and social influences in France, are not without their background of
philosophical contemplation of the end and aims of man. Mr. Myers's
conclusion of the whole matter is hopeful, sane, temperate. He is
confident of the golden branch in the grove of cypress; confident that
darkness must eventually become revelation. In his verse, which,
while not of the first order, is melodious and graceful, he exhibits
the same spiritual intuition. His value as a critic is largely the
result of this recognition, based on no ephemeral conclusions, of the
spiritual element in the destiny of man. Mr. Myers was born in
1843, in Duffield, England. He is the son of a clergyman of some
note as a writer, and a brother of Ernest Myers, whose classical trans-
lations are of great literary excellence.


## p. 10513 (#385) ##########################################

FREDERIC WILLIAM HENRY MYERS
10513
THE DISENCHANTMENT OF FRANCE
From Science and a Future Life >
IT
HAS fallen to the lot of the French people to point more
morals, to emphasize more lessons from their own experience,
than any other nation in modern history. Parties and creeds
of the most conflicting types have appealed to Paris in turn for
their brightest example, their most significant warning. The
strength of monarchy and the risks of despotism; the nobility of
faith and the cruel cowardice of bigotry; the ardor of republican
fraternity and the terrors of anarchic disintegration-the most
famous instance of any and every extreme is to be found in the
long annals of France. And so long as the French mind, at
once logical and mobile, continues to be the first to catch and
focus the influences which are slowly beginning to tell on neigh-
boring States, so long will its evolution possess for us the unique
interest of a glimpse into stages of development through which
our own national mind also may be destined ere long to pass.
Yet there has of late been a kind of reluctance on the part of
other civilized countries to take to themselves the lessons which
French history still can teach. In Germany there has been a
tone of reprobation, an opposition of French vice to Teuton vir-
tue; and in England there has been some aloofness of feeling,
some disposition to think that the French have fallen, through
their own fault, into a decadence which our robuster nation need
not fear.
In the brief review, however, which this essay will contain
of certain gloomy symptoms in the spiritual state of France, we
shall keep entirely clear of any disparaging comparisons or insin-
uated blame. Rather, we shall regard France as the most sensi-
tive organ of the European body politic; we shall feel that her
dangers of to-day are ours of to-morrow, and that unless there
still be salvation for her, our own prospects are dark indeed.
But in the first place, it may be asked, what right have we
to speak of France as decadent at all? The word, indeed, is so
constantly employed by French authors of the day, that the for-
eigner may assume without impertinence that there is some fit-
ness in its use. Yet have we here much more than a fashion of
speaking? the humor of men who are "sad as night for very
wantonness," who play with the notion of national decline as a
XVIII-658


## p. 10514 (#386) ##########################################

10514
FREDERIC WILLIAM HENRY MYERS
rich man in temporary embarrassment may play with the notion
of ruin? France is richer and more populous than ever before;
her soldiers still fight bravely; and the mass of her population,
as judged by the statistics of crime, or by the colorless half-sheet
which forms the only national newspaper, is at any rate tranquil
and orderly. Compare the state of France now with her state
just a century since, before the outbreak of the Revolution. Ob-
servers who noted that misgovernment and misery, those hordes
of bandits prowling over the untilled fields, assumed it as mani-
fest that not the French monarchy only, but France herself, was
crumbling in irremediable decay. And yet a few years later, the
very children reared as half slaves, half beggars, on black bread
and ditch-water, were marching with banners flying into Vienna
and Moscow. One must be wary in predicting the decline of a
nation which holds in reserve a spring of energy such as this.
Once more. Not physically alone but intellectually, France
has never, perhaps, been stronger than she is now. She is lack-
ing indeed in statesmen of the first order, in poets and artists
of lofty achievement; and if our diagnosis be correct, she must
inevitably lack such men as these. But on the other hand, her
living savants probably form as wise, as disinterested a group
of intellectual leaders as any epoch of her history has known.
And she listens to them with a new deference; she receives re-
spectfully even the bitter home-truths of M. Taine; she honors.
M. Renan instead of persecuting him; she makes M. Pasteur her
national hero. These men and men like these are virtually at
the head of France; and if the love of truth, the search for
truth, fortifies a nation, then assuredly France should be stronger
now than under any of her kings or her Cæsars.
Yet here we come to the very crux of the whole inquiry. If
we maintain that an increasing knowledge of truth is necessarily
a strength or advantage to a nation or an individual, we are as-
suming an affirmative answer to two weighty questions: the first,
whether the scheme of the universe is on the whole good rather
than evil; the second, whether, even granting that the sum of
things is good, each advancing step of our knowledge of the uni-
verse brings with it an increased realization of that ultimate
goodness.
Of course if we return to the first question the pes-
simistic answer,- if the world is a bad place, and cosmic suicide
the only reasonable thing,—the present discussion may at once
be closed. For in that case there is no such thing as progress,


## p. 10515 (#387) ##########################################

FREDERIC WILLIAM HENRY MYERS
10515
no such thing as recovery; and the moral discouragement of
France does but indicate her advance upon the road which we
must all inevitably travel.
Let us assume, however, as is commonly assumed without too
curious question, that the universe is good, and that to know the
truth about it is on the whole an invigorating thing. Yet even
thus, it is by no means clear that each onward step we make
in learning that truth will in itself be felt as invigorating. All
analogy is against such a supposition: whether we turn to the
history of philosophy, and the depression repeatedly following on
the collapse of specious but premature conceptions, or to the
history of individual minds, and the despair of the beginner in
every art or study when he recognizes that he has made a false.
start, that he knows almost nothing, that the problems are far
more difficult than his ignorance had suspected.
Now I think it is not hard to show that France, even on
the most hopeful view of her, is at present passing through a
moment of spiritual reaction such as this. In that country, where
the pure dicta of science reign in the intellectual classes with.
less interference from custom, sentiment, tradition, than even in
Germany itself, we shall find that science, at her present point,
is a depressing, a disintegrating energy.
And therefore, when we compare the present state of France
with her state a century ago, we must not rank her dominant
savants as a source of national strength. Rather, they are a
source of disenchantment, of disillusionment, to use the phrase of
commonest recurrence in modern French literature and speech.
Personally indeed the class of savants includes many an example
of unselfish diligence, of stoical candor; but their virtues are per-
sonal to themselves, and the upshot of their teaching affords no
stable basis for virtue.
We may say, then, that in 1888 France possesses everything
except illusions; in 1788 she possessed illusions and nothing else.
The Reign of Reason, the Return to Nature, the Social Contract,
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity-the whole air of that wild time
buzzed with new-hatched Chimeras, while at the same time the
old traditions of Catholicism, Loyalty, Honor, were still living in
many an ardent heart.
What then is, in effect, the disenchantment which France
has undergone? What are the illusions-the so-called, so-judged
illusions — which are fading now before the influence of science?


## p. 10516 (#388) ##########################################

10516
FREDERIC WILLIAM HENRY MYERS
How is a foreigner to analyze the confused changes in a great
people's spiritual life? Must not his own personal acquaintance
with Frenchmen, which is sure to be slight and shallow, unduly
influence his judgment of the nation? It seems to me that
he must set aside his personal acquaintanceships, and form his
opinion from current literature and current events; endeavoring
so far as may be to elicit such general views of life as may be
latent in the varying utterances of novelist, essayist, politician,
philosopher, and poet. Thus reading and thus comparing, we
shall discern a gradual atrophy of certain habits of thought, cer-
tain traditional notions; and if we class as illusions these old
conceptions from which the French people seem gradually to be
awakening, we find them reducible to four main heads: the reli-
gious, the political, the sexual, and the personal illusions.
By the "religious illusion, "-speaking, it will be remem-
bered, from the point of view of the Frenchman of the type now
under discussion,-I mean a belief in the moral government of
the world, generally involving a belief in man's future life; in
which life we may suppose virtue victorious, and earth's injust-
ices redressed. These cardinal beliefs, now everywhere on the
defensive, are plainly losing ground in France more rapidly than
elsewhere. And the strange thing is, that while Christianity thus
declines, it seems to leave in France so little regret behind it
that its disappearance is signalized only by loud battles between
"Liberalism" and "Clericalism"; not, as in England, by sad
attempts at reconciliation, by the regrets and appeals of slowly
severing men. A book like Châteaubriand's 'Génie du Christian-
isme,' nay, even a book like Lamennais's 'Paroles d'un Croyant,'
would now be felt to be an anachronism. Militant Catholicism
seems almost to have died out with M. Veuillot's article in the
Univers; and an application to a high ecclesiastical authority for
recent defenses of the faith brought to me only a recommendation
to read the Bishops' Charges, the mandements d'évêque. Paradox
as it may seem, M. Renan is almost the only French writer of
influence who believes that Christianity—of course a Christianity
without miracles-will be in any sense the religion of the future;
and his recent utterances show that pious sentiment, in his hands,
is liable to sudden and unexpected transformations.
Let us pass on to the second class of illusions from which
France seems finally to have awakened Under the title of the
"political illusion" we may include two divergent yet not wholly


## p. 10517 (#389) ##########################################

FREDERIC WILLIAM HENRY MYERS
10517
disparate emotions, the enthusiasm of loyalty and the enthu-
siasm of equality. Each of these enthusiasms has done in old
times great things for France; each in turn has seemed to offer
a self-evident, nay, a Divine organization of the perplexed affairs
of men.
But each in turn has lost its efficacy. There is now
scarcely a name but General Boulanger's in France which will
raise a cheer; scarcely even a Socialistic Utopia for which a man.
would care to die. The younger nations, accustomed to look to
France for inspiration, feel the dryness of that ancient source.
"Ils ne croient à rien," said a Russian of the Nihilists,
" mais
ils ont besoin du martyre" (They believe in nothing, but they
must have martyrdom). The Nihilists, indeed, are like the lem-
mings, which swim out to sea in obedience to an instinct that
bids them seek a continent long since sunk beneath the waves.
Gentle anarchists, pious atheists, they follow the blind instinct
of self-devotion which makes the force of a naïve, an unworldly
people. But there is now no intelligible object of devotion left
for them to seek; and they go to the mines and to the gib-
bet without grasping a single principle or formulating a single
hope. These are the pupils of modern France; but in France
herself the nihilistic disillusionment works itself out unhindered by
the old impulse to die for an idea. The French have died for
too many ideas already; and just as they have ceased to idealize
man's relationship to God, so have they ceased at last to idealize
his relationship to his fellow-men.
But the process of disillusionment can be traced deeper still.
Closer to us, in one sense, than our relation to the universe as a
whole, more intimate than our relation to our fellow-citizens, is
the mutual relation between the sexes. An emotion such as love,
at once vague, complex, and absorbing, is eminently open to fresh
interpretation as the result of modern analysis. And on compar-
ing what may be called the enchanted and disenchanted estimates
of this passion,-the view of Plato, for instance, and the view
of Schopenhauer,—we find that the discordance goes to the very
root of the conception; that what in Plato's view is the accident,
is in Schopenhauer's the essential; that what Plato esteemed as
the very aim and essence is for Schopenhauer a delusive fig-
ment, a witchery cast over man's young inexperience, from which
adult reason should shake itself wholly free.
For Plato the act
of idealization which constitutes love is closely akin to the act of
idealization which constitutes worship. The sudden passion which
―


## p. 10518 (#390) ##########################################

10518
FREDERIC WILLIAM HENRY MYERS
carries the lover beyond all thought of self is the result of a
memory and a yearning which the beloved one's presence stirs
within him; a memory of ante-natal visions, a yearning towards
the home of the soul. The true end of love is mutual ennoble-
ment; its fruition lies in the unseen. Or if we look to its earthly
issue, it is not children only who are born from such unions as
these, but from that fusion of earnest spirits, great thoughts, just
laws, noble institutions spring,-"a fairer progeny than any child
of man. "
Not one of the speculations of antiquity outdid in lofty origi
nality this theme of Plato's. And however deeply the changing.
conditions of civilization might modify the outward forms or set-
ting of love, this far-reaching conception has been immanent in
the poet's mind, and has made of love an integral element in the
spiritual scheme of things. "Love was given," says Wordsworth,
in a poem which strangely harmonizes the antique and the mod-
ern ideal,-
"Love was given,
Encouraged, sanctioned, chiefly for that end:
For this the passion to excess was driven,—
That self might be annulled; her bondage prove
The fetters of a dream, opposed to Love. "
And even when the passion has not been thus directly linked
with ethical aims, it has been credited with a heaven-sent, a mys-
terious charm; like the beauty and scent of flowers, it has been
regarded as a joy given to us for the mere end of joy.
In recent years, however, a wholly different aspect of the pas-
sion of love has been raised into prominence. This new theory-
for it is hardly less-is something much deeper than the mere
satirical depreciation, the mere ascetic horror, of the female sex.
It recognizes the mystery, the illusion, the potency of love: but
it urges that this dominating illusion is no heaven-descended
charm of life, but the result of terrene evolution; and that, so far
from being salutary to the individual, it is expressly designed
to entrap him into subserving the ends of the race, even when
death to himself (or herself) is the immediate consequence. It
was in England that the facts in natural history which point to
this conclusion were first set forth; it was in Germany that a
philosophical theory was founded (even before most of those facts.
were known) upon these blind efforts of the race, working through
the passions of the individual, yet often to his ruin: but it is in


## p. 10519 (#391) ##########################################

FREDERIC WILLIAM HENRY MYERS
10519
France that we witness the actual entry of this theory into the
affairs of life,- the gradual dissipation of the "sexual illusion"
which nature has so long been weaving with unconscious magic
around the senses and the imagination of man.
In the first place, then, human attractiveness has suffered some-
thing of the same loss of romance which has fallen upon the
scent and color of flowers, since we have realized that these have
been developed as an attraction to moths and other insects, whose
visits to the flower are necessary to secure effective fertilization.
Our own attractiveness in each other's eyes seems no longer to
point to some Divine reminiscence; rather, it is a character which
natural and sexual selection must needs have developed, if our
race was to persist at all: and it is paralleled by elaborate and
often grotesque æsthetic allurements throughout the range of
organized creatures of separate sex.
Once more. The great Roman poet of "wheat and woodland,
tilth and vineyard, hive and horse and herd," insisted long ago
on the divergence, throughout animated nature, of the prompt-
ings of amorous passion and of self-preservation. Passing beyond
the facile optimism of pastoral singers, he showed the peace, the
strength, the life of the animal creation at the mercy of an
instinct which they can neither comprehend nor disobey. In
furias ignemque ruunt. Advancing science has both confirmed
and explained this profound observation. She has discovered
instances where the instinct in question conducts not merely to a
remote and contingent but to an immediate and inevitable death,
and where yet it works itself out with unfailing punctuality. And
she has demonstrated that in the race of races the individual
must not pause for breath; his happiness, his length of days
must be subordinated to the supreme purpose of leaving a pro-
geny which can successfully prolong the endless struggle. And
here the bitter philosophy of Schopenhauer steps in, and shows
that as man rises from the savage state, the form of the illusive
witchery changes, but the witchery is still the same. Nature is
still prompting us to subserve the advantage of the race,—an
advantage which is not our own,- though she uses now such del-
icate baits as artistic admiration, spiritual sympathy, the union
of kindred souls. Behind and beneath all these is still her old
unconscious striving; but she can scarcely any longer outwit us:
we now desire neither the pangs of passion, nor the restraints
of marriage, nor the burden of offspring; while for the race we


## p. 10520 (#392) ##########################################

10520
FREDERIC WILLIAM HENRY MYERS
need care nothing, or may even deem it best and most merciful
that the race itself should lapse and pass away.
The insensible advance of this sexual disenchantment will
show itself first and most obviously in the imaginative literature
of a nation. And the transition from romanticism to so-called
naturalism in fiction, which is the conspicuous fact of the day in
France, is ill understood if it be taken to be a mere change in
literary fashion, a mere reaction against sentimental and stylistic
extravagance. The naturalists claim-and the claim is just-
that they seek at least a closer analogy with the methods of
science herself; that they rest not on fantastic fancies, but on
the documents humains which are furnished by the actual life
of every day. But on the other hand, the very fact that this is
all which they desire to do, is enough to prove that even this
will scarcely be worth the doing. The fact that they thus shrink
from idealizing bespeaks an epoch barren in ideal. Schopen-
hauer boasted that he had destroyed "die Dame," the chivalrous
conception of woman. as a superior being; and such novels
as those of Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant, exhibit the world with
this illusion gone. If, moreover, the relations between men and
women are not kept, in a sense, above the relations between men
and men, they will rapidly fall below them. We are led into a
world of joyless vice from the sheer decay of the conception of
virtue.
-
And thus we are brought, by a natural transition, to the
fourth and last illusion from which French thought is shaking
itself free, the illusion which pervades man more profoundly
than any other: the dream of his own free-will, and of his psy-
chical unity. It is in the analysis of this personal illusion that
much of the acutest French work has lately been done; it is here
that ordinary French opinion is perhaps furthest removed from
the English type; and it is here, moreover, as I shall presently
indicate,—it is on this field of experimental psychology,- that
the decisive battles of the next century seem likely to be fought.
In this essay, however, I must keep clear of detail, and must
touch only on the general effect of the mass of teaching.
As regards the freedom of the will, indeed, it might have
been supposed that the controversy had now been waged too long
to admit of much accession of novel argument. Nor, of course,
can any theory which we hold as to human free-will reasonably
influence our actions one way or the other. Yet we know that


## p. 10521 (#393) ##########################################

FREDERIC WILLIAM HENRY MYERS
10521
as
a matter of actual observation, Mahommedan fatalism does
influence conduct; and the determinism which is becoming defi-
nitely the creed of France may similarly be traced throughout
their modern pictures of life and character, as a paralyzing influ-
ence in moments of decisive choice, of moral crisis.
I have now, though in a very brief and imperfect way, ac-
complished the task which seemed to me to have some promise
of instruction. I have tried to decompose into its constituent ele-
ments the vague but general sense of malaise or decadence which
permeates so much of modern French literature and life. And
after referring this disenchantment to the loss of certain beliefs
and habits of thought which the majority of educated French-
men have come with more or less distinctness to class as illus-
ions, I have endeavored-it may be thought with poor success-
to suggest some possibility of the reconstitution of these illus-
ions on a basis which can permanently resist scientific attack. In
experimental psychology I have suggested, so to say, a nostrum,
but without propounding it as a panacea; and I cannot avoid the
conclusion that we are bound to be prepared for the worst. Yet
by the worst" I do not mean any catastrophe of despair, any
cosmic suicide, any world-wide unchaining of the brute that lies
pent in man. I mean merely the peaceful, progressive, orderly
triumph of l'homme sensuel moyen [the average man]; the gradual
adaptation of hopes and occupations to a purely terrestrial stand-
ard; the calculated pleasures of the cynic who is resolved to be a
dupe no more.
Such is the prospect from our tower of augury—the warning
note from France, whose inward crises have so often prefigured
the fates through which Western Europe was to pass ere long.
Many times, indeed, have declining nations risen anew, when
some fresh knowledge, some untried adventure, has added meaning
and zest to life. Let those men speak to us, if any there be,
who can strengthen our hearts with some prevision happier than
mine. For if this vanward and eager people is never to be
"begotten again unto a lively hope" by some energy still unfelt
and unsuspected, then assuredly France will not suffer alone from
her atrophy of higher life. No; in that case like causes else-
where must produce like effects; and there are other great nations
whose decline will not be long delayed.


## p. 10522 (#394) ##########################################

10522
MYTHS AND FOLK-LORE OF THE ARYAN
PEOPLES
BY WILLIAM SHARP AND ERNEST RHYS
W
ITH the advance of the new science of folk-lore, we are apt
to forget perhaps that the old literature on which the study
is based is one of the richest and most entertaining in the
world. Fairy-tale is its foster-mother, and the home out of which it
passed is as mysterious as fairy-land itself, and as full of wonders;
although the name of "Aryan" may seem at a first glance to suggest
only the science of races, or the endless differences of the doctors of
philology over the relations of myth to the decay of language. That,
however, is a side of the subject upon which we are not called to
dwell. Science apart, it is enough to show that the way into the old
wonder-land where the early Aryans first drew breath, and shaped
our speech, and began our traditions, may be traveled for the sheer
pleasure of the adventure, as well as for abstruser ends.
The mys
terious door of the Aryan mythologies may look forbidding, but its
"Open sesame! " is nothing more occult than the title of the first
time-honored fairy-tale one happens to remember. And once inside
this dim ancestral gate, the demesne is so richly fertile, and so vari-
ous in its partitions and pleasaunces, that the idlest observer can-
not but be allured further. The Aryan realm, eastern and western,
includes not only the Greek, Scandinavian, and Indian mythologies,
but Slavic folk-tales, Roumanian folk-songs, Sicilian idyls, and all
the confused popular traditions of the Anglo-Celtic peoples.
If we
may believe the folk-lorists, -as here at least we can do,- King
Arthur and Queen Guinevere are among its heroic children, equally
with Odin and Sigurd, or Heracles and Helen of Troy. Its music
is echoed in the early Celtic elemental rhymes and poems, equally
with the Vedic Hymns and the epic strain of Homer. Its traditions
flit to and fro over the face of the earth, from the Ganges to the
Mississippi, from the Thames to the Tiber. The nursery tales we tell
our children to-day are, many of them, but variants of the old primi-
tive tales of Light and Darkness, Sleep and Silence, told to the babes
that watched the flames flicker, or heard the wolves howl, amid the
trees of that unmapped region which was the birthplace of the Aryan
peoples.


## p. 10523 (#395) ##########################################

MYTHS AND FOLK-LORE OF THE ARYAN PEOPLES
10523
It is clear that the primary myths and folk-tales of so vast an
order of mankind, and the secondary more conscious literary devel-
opment of the same subject-matter, together make an immense con-
tribution to the world's literature. We can at best indicate here a
little of its richness and extent, referring our readers to the original
authorities for the full history of the subject. Even so, it must be
kept in mind that folk-lore is still a new science; and that collections
of native tales and traditions, as they still survive to-day, have been
made with anything like order only within the last half-century.
Every year now sees valuable new contributions from the various folk-
lore societies,- additions which, it is clear, must affect closely the
labors of the comparative mythologists, and the results at which they
arrive. Professor Max Müller's works, Mr. J. G. Frazer's 'Golden
Bough,' Mr. Clodd's Myths and Dreams,' Mr. Andrew Lang's 'Cus-
tom and Myth,' Mr. Sidney Hartland's 'Legend of Perseus,' Principal
Rhys's Hibbert Lectures, '-all these are works which have helped
to give folk-lore its modern status and significance; and they are but
the pioneers of a critical and co-ordinating system which is only now
beginning to assume its right effects and proportions. But here it
is not with the method and modern theories, but with the legendary
survivals and mythic traditions of folk-lore, that we are concerned.
It is not even necessary for us to decide the vexed question of the
exact region in Europe or Asia whence the Aryan peoples originally
sprang. Whether indeed it be in the Ural slopes, the Norse valleys,
or the plateau of the Himalaya, that the newest argument places the
cradle of the Aryan, we shall still find, most likely, that the illus-
trations of the argument adduced are more interesting than the argu-
ment itself.
In the same way, although we may not accept the solar theory in
mythology, our interest in sun myths and the folk-tales that have
grown out of them, will be undiminished. Again, if Mr. Herbert
Spencer's theory of the origin of mythology and its fables-that it
was an outgrowth of primitive man's ancestor-worship—seems doubt-
ful, we shall still find the whole range of fetish and totem traditions
and beliefs full of profoundly suggestive matter of fancy and matter
of fact. Thinking on it, we shall turn with a new feeling to many
old rural reminders of death; or to such testimony as that of Ovid's
lines,-
"Est honor et tumulis," etc. ,*-
in which he describes the Feast of the Romans in the Ides of Febru-
ary in honor of the ghosts of their ancestors.
The mysteries of death, and of the forces of nature; the inter-
change of light and darkness; the passing of the sun; - we need no
*« And even to the tomb is honor paid. "— (Fasti. )


## p. 10524 (#396) ##########################################

10524
MYTHS AND FOLK-LORE OF THE ARYAN PEOPLES
theory to account for the early effect these had on the savage imagi-
nations of our primitive Aryan forefathers. Of the aerial and earthly
phenomena, which worked early upon the mind of man, and led him
to weave a myth out of the emotions and sensations they caused,
the sun perhaps affords the best instance. For, go where you will
through the uttermost regions of the Aryan peoples, as we now rec-
ognize them, you will still find the sun, and with him the moon and
the stars, regnant in the realm of folk-lore. Take in the 'Rig-Veda'
(x. 95), the poem of the love of Urvasi and Pururavas, in which Pro-
fessor Max Müller considers the latter to stand for the sun, while
Urvasi is the early dawn. Or take the folk-song sung on New Year's
Eve by that most primitive and archaic of European peoples, the
Mordvins, an offshoot of the Finns, who live between the Volga
and the Oka, in a territory extending on both sides of the Sura:—
"Denyan Lasunyas
Is a bright moon,
His wife Masai
A ruddy sun.
And Denyan's children
Are the stars.
Tannysai! »
In this stanza it is seen that the sun is a woman, contrary to the
custom in myth, early and late; except-and this is a matter of great
and interesting significance-in the instance of Celtic, or at least
Gaelic-Celtic myth and legendary lore, where the sun is always fem-
inine. But indeed, to quote Mr. Edward Clodd, "the names given to
the sun in mythology are as manifold as his aspects and influences,
and as the moods of the untutored minds that endowed him with the
complex and contrary qualities which make up the nature of man. ”
And the gender of the sun, as well as of many other natural phe-
nomena, is found to change frequently in different tongues; but as
a rule, in Aryan folk-lore, he is masculine, and the moon feminine.
In the old Greek myths, both sun and moon are fully endowed with
human qualities and human passions and failings; and yet the sun is
godlike, and has powers far beyond those of humankind. "The sun,"
we are reminded by the modern mythologists, "is all-seeing and all-
penetrating. In a Greek song of to-day, a mother sends a message
to an absent daughter by the sun; it is but an unconscious repeti-
tion of the request of the dying Ajax, that the heavenly body will
tell his fate to his old father and his sorrowing spouse. "
If we arrive at something like a sympathetic understanding of the
tendency in primitive man to humanize and personify the signs and
appearances of nature, we shall be very near an explanation of the
Greek mythology, and its marvelous confusion of noble and ignoble, of


## p. 10525 (#397) ##########################################

MYTHS AND FOLK-LORE OF THE ARYAN PEOPLES
10525
heroic and demoralized deities. The savage survival in that mythol-
ogy of so many of the more gross and repulsive elements of folk-
lore is but another proof of the extraordinary persistence of traditional
ideas, as against consciously reasoned ideas, of nature. While in art,
and in human intelligence and conduct of life, they had grown into
the civilized condition which made an Aristotle and a Plato possible,
their primitive mythopoeic sense, as it existed some thousand years
before, still retained its hold on them. Do we not find the same
survival, in our most modern races, of superstitions as old as the
oldest Aryan type?
The oldest survivals of all in the Greek religion are not to be
learnt from the pages of Homer and the Greek dramatists, but from
what we may gather indirectly from those obscurer sources in which
folk-lore has so often had its memorials overlaid with dust. To eke
out these reminders, we have the more formal testimony of such
authors as Pausanias and Eusebius, Herodotus and Lactantius, Por-
phyrius and Plutarch. Pausanias tells us, in mysterious terms, of the
dreadful rites on the Lycæan Hill, as late as the second century. On
the crest of the mountain is the altar of Zeus; and before it "stand
two pillars facing the rising sun, and thereon golden eagles of yet
more ancient workmanship. And on this altar they sacrifice to Zeus
in a manner that may not be spoken, and little liking had I to make
much search into this matter. But let it be as it is, and as it hath
been from the beginning. " Mr. Lang, commenting on this ominous.
passage, reminds us that "the traditional myths of Arcadia tell of
the human sacrifices of Lycaon, and of men who, tasting the meat
of a mixed sacrifice, put human flesh between their lips unawares. "
The horrors of "Voodoo" among the negroes of Hayti, or the tradi-
tion of human sacrifices in the Vedic religion, or among the Druids in
ancient time, show how religious rites were apt to conserve strange
and terrible mythical ideas, century after century.
From the Jewish and other non-Aryan rites, we may gather many
interesting corroborative particulars as to the law and manner of
sacrifice. But without following up the more tragic and terrible side
of its ancient practice, as relating to the peculiar expiatory virtue of
human victims, let us recall that much of the existing folk-lore of
fire naturally associates itself with the lingering of the traditions con-
cerning its use in the rites of the altar, from time immemorial.
Those who have read Mr. J. G. Frazer's remarkable treatise on
the esoteric explanation of the old mythical traditions, 'The Golden
Bough,' will readily recall the ancient mysteries of the lovely wood-
land lake of Nemi, with which he begins his book. The scene is
enshrined in all its beauty, and idealized with a perfect imagination,
*<Myth, Ritual, and Religion,' Vol. i. , page 269.


## p. 10526 (#398) ##########################################

10526 MYTHS AND FOLK-LORE OF THE ARYAN PEOPLES
in Turner's picture of The Golden Bough,' in which the classic
forms of the lovely nymphs of Diana's train are seen dancing. But
another form, ominous and sinister, was at one time to be seen in
the sanctuary there,- that of the priest of Nemi, pacing the grove,
sword in hand, awaiting the predestinate coming of him who should
break off the Golden Bough from the one sacred tree, and try to
slay him, and so succeed to his dreadful and mysterious priesthood.
For a man could only become the priest of Nemi by first slaying a
former holder of the office. And this was but the dark initiation of
a profoundly symbolistic ritual in honor of the tutelary goddess,
Diana Nemorensis,- Diana of the Grove,-in whose rites Fire played
a very essential and striking part. Now, without following up Mr.
Frazer's suggestive line of argument, and without insisting theoreti-
cally on the significance of Fire as a Sun-symbol, or the Golden
Bough as a Tree-symbol, or the slaying and the slain priest as a
type of the "slain God," it may be seen what a long series of vital
associations is opened up to the student of folk-lore by such things.
Many of our simplest festive and social celebrations to-day have an
ancestry older far than the oldest literary memorials we possess.
We still speak with a certain serious and hospitable sentiment of
the hearth; which is a relic of the primitive awe and mythopoeic
sense with which our wild first forefathers regarded the familiar
spirit that haunts every house, and makes life in our northern lati-
tudes possible and pleasant. Most readers now can only recall,
within their own experience, any acquaintance with primitive fire lore
in connection with Christmas and its Yule log, or perhaps a fire set
burning on New Year's Eve and kept alight until the incoming of
the New Year, or a bonfire lighted for some modern commemoration.
But even so, it is remarkable that the sense of the mystery of the
fire, and its essential sacredness, have so far escaped the cumulative
attacks of all our anti-superstitious civilization. The pedigree, for
instance, of the tradition about a sacred and inviolable hearth, or of
a living fire that must not be extinguished, is one of the most inter-
esting in all Aryan folk-lore. Accepting provisionally the theory
that a Russo-Finnish region was at least one of the first to be
touched by the effluent stream of the Aryan race, let us note that
the sacredness of the fire is a prime article in the creed of the Rus-
sian peasant. Mr. W. R. S. Ralston tells us in his delightful Songs
of the Russian People,' that when a Russian family moves to a new
house "the fire is raked out of the old stove into a jar, and solemnly
conveyed to the new one; the words 'Welcome, grandfather, to the
new home! ' being uttered when it arrives there. " Among that
primitive Russian people the Mordvins, to whom we alluded above,
on Christmas Eve a fire is lit in the stove with a special ceremony.
A burning candle is placed before the stove, and a fagot of birch


## p. 10527 (#399) ##########################################

MYTHS AND FOLK-LORE OF THE ARYAN PEOPLES
10527
rods is lighted at its flame, while the mistress of the house says a
half-pagan prayer. * This fagot is then placed on the hearth-stone,
and the wood in the stove kindled from it; while a brand from the
last Christmas festival is placed on top of the whole kindling.
Passing now from the Mordvins to the Gaelic corner of the Aryan
world, and from the domestic to the more ceremonial uses of fire, we
find an extremely suggestive instance in the Scotch Highlands, where
bonfires, known as the "Beltane Fires," used to be kindled on May
Day. The fires were kindled by antiquated methods, with no small
ceremony, usually on some prominent hill-top. Traditionally, this fire
and its ash had all kinds of magic virtues, in curing disease, breaking
evil spells, etc. When the fire was well alight, an oatcake was made,
toasted by its heat, and then broken into little bits; one piece being
made black with charcoal. Next, the bits were put into a bonnet,
and lots were drawn, and the man drawing the black bit was called
Cailleach bealtine, - the Beltane carline,—and was supposed to be burnt
in the fire as a sacrifice to Baal. His companions indeed made a
show of putting him into the bonfire; but the ceremony was consid-
ered complete if he jumped thrice through the flames. In this, there
is no doubt, as Mr. Frazer points out in his 'Golden Bough,' we have
the clear trace of a human sacrifice by fire, lingering in a semi-
playful rustic ceremony.
In Europe generally, such fire feasts are held on Midsummer Eve
(23d June) or Midsummer Day (24th June); and besides the usual
bonfires, torch processions, and the custom of rolling a fiery wheel
down the slopes of the appointed hill, formed part of the feast. One
finds these still in many parts of Germany, as at Kouz on the
Moselle; in Poitou; in Brittany; and they existed, or still exist, in
Wales, Ireland, and the Isle of Man, and several parts of England.
We have not space to do more than allude in passing to the curi-
ous and prevalent belief in "need-fires," kindled to drive off plague,
pestilence, and famine; always kindled by the friction of wood or
the revolution of a wheel. As it is, we have taken but one out of
the many familiar things of every-day association which are found on
examination to discover the most remarkable traditionary interest, in
the light of the old Aryan myths and folk-lore.
The study of the lesser signs and symbols, the familiar odds and
ends of daily life, that in primitive times were used to express man's
feeling for the mystery of a difficult world, ordered by laws and
forces which he did not comprehend, brings us to the question of
fetishes and fetishism; a term which was first used by that pioneer
*"O Cham Pas, have mercy upon us; let the ruddy sun rise, warm us
with his warmth, and cause our corn to grow in great plenty for us all! »


## p. 10528 (#400) ##########################################

10528
MYTHS AND FOLK-LORE OF THE ARYAN PEOPLES
of mythology, De Brosses, in his 'Culte des Dieux Fétiches,' in the
middle of the eighteenth century, and which is derived from a
Portuguese word meaning a talisman. But on this, again, we can
only touch in the briefest way; since to do justice to the subject it is
necessary to adventure far outside our limits, and indeed into fields
of extra-Aryan mythology, and of the folk-lore of non-Aryan savage
tribes that do not come within our province. But Professor Max
Müller, in his Hibbert Lectures and elsewhere, has used the evidence
freely that is supplied in the Indo-Aryan literature, and all the pro-
found sense of the infinite in the Indo-Aryan myths, in discounting
the prevalence of fetishism among the primitive Aryans. We do not
at all agree with his conclusions. But he helps us to see that the
deities of the Vedas' and 'Brahmanas' (the hymns and books of
devotion of India) are sprung from the same order of personified ele-
mental phenomena as the fire-god or the sun-hero in other Aryan
mythologies. To take Indra, the chief of these deities: we trace in
the anomalous attributes of his divinity the signs of a savage deity
who was now the offspring of a cow, now a ram,—a ram that on
occasion could fly. Moreover, is there not a savage survival in the
idea that Indra was much addicted to soma-drinking; or that he
committed the "unpardonable sin" (according to the Vedic cult),
i. e. , the slaying of a Brahman? Indra even drank soma which was
not intended for him, and the dregs became Vrittra the serpent, his
enemy. In fighting this foe, Indra lost his energy, which fell to earth
and begot trees and shrubs; while Vrittra, being cut in half, accounted
for the moon and other phenomena in the universe. In pursuing this
branch of mythology, the superb library afforded by the Sacred
Books of the East' may be consulted, eked out by such other works
as Dr. Muir's Ancient Sanskrit Texts,' and Ludwig's translation of
the Rig-Veda. ' The same mixture of sublime and ideal and lofty
ideas with savage and primitive and wildly immoral conceptions of
the gods, will be found in the Indo-Aryan, that is found in the Greek
mythology.
There is no need to dwell here on the account that Homer gives
of the Greek gods, and their conduct and misconduct of their Divine
affairs, for Homer will be found treated elsewhere; but let us recall
that the children of Heaven and Earth, if we turn from Homer to
Hesiod, included Ocean, Hyperion, Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne,
Tethys, and Cronus. And then we come to the Greek Indra, in Zeus;
who unlike Indra, however, is born in the second generation of the
gods, and even then only saved by a trick from the all-devouring
wrath of his father Cronus. Cronus alone affords a myth that is a
sort of test of the whole mythopoeic making of divinities out of crude
material, and preserving the cruder characteristics even in the highly


## p. 10529 (#401) ##########################################

MYTHS AND FOLK-LORE OF THE ARYAN PEOPLES 10529
developed forms of a complex, consciously arranged mythology. It is
thus we follow the early Greek myths, and watch them passing out
of pure folk-lore and primary mythology into secondary and literary
forms, until we come to their presentment by Homer and Hesiod.
It is the same process as we see, working on equally Aryan ideas,
in the Scandinavian mythology; until it arrives at its secondary
stage, in the marvelous world of human and divine creation in the
'Nibelungen Lied. ' In this evolution of barbaric divinities, and the
elaboration of the crude heroic ideal, Odin may be compared very
suggestively with the Greek Zeus, and Zeus with the Vedic Indra;
and Indra again with the Norse Odin: and much light may thus be
gained by a resort to comparative mythology in considering the chief
deities of the greater Indo-European systems of ex-Christian religion.
But indeed, whether we study the great myths or the humblest
things in folk-lore, the Indo-European or Aryan tongues will be found
to stammer out at last but the same message of the infinities that
received its highest expression in a Semitic tongue. The Celts and
Germans, the Sanskrit and Zendish peoples, the Latins and Greeks,
all belong to one family of speech; but even a ten-centuries main-
tained speech is less permanent, and a less certain synthetic measure
of man, than human nature and human imagination. And it is only
now, when folk-lore is beginning to see the common ground betwixt
the Aryan and the non-Aryan races and their histories, that it is
learning to make its lanterns light for us the "dark backward and
abysm of time," across which we look wistfully to the legended old
dreams first dreamt in the childish cradle sleep of our race. Like
faint memories of that cradle sleep, we listen now to the myths of
the creation of the earth, and of man's destiny; myths of the stars;
myths of the joy and sorrow of life and death; and of fire and of the
elements. Read apart, they are beautiful and divine fables; read in
the unity of man's common aspiration, they are the testament of the
imperfect first beginning, and the slow growth toward perfection, of
his expression of the mystery of nature, and of the eternal that is
behind nature.
A word remains to be said about the illustrative items that follow,
which are chosen mainly with a view to showing the variety of the
entertainment offered by the Aryan myths and folk-lore. As it is,
we have omitted those fairy and folk tales, which are, like 'Rumpel-
stilskin' and 'Jack the Giant-Killer,' enshrined in every reader's
memory; we have omitted also such passages as those in Homer,
or the 'Nibelungen Lied,' or in the Arthurian legendary romances,
which fall under other departments of the present work. Of those
which do appear, and which may not carry their full and sufficient
XVIII-659


## p. 10530 (#402) ##########################################

10530 MYTHS AND FOLK-LORE OF THE ARYAN PEOPLES
explanation on the face of them, we may explain that the 'Kinvad
Bridge' and the 'Brig o' Dread' show the identity and the world-
wide prevalence of the folk-lore relating to the passage of the souls
of the dead. The contemporary Russian account of the faith in
'Hangman's Rope' points to the old idea, common in witches' pre-
scriptions, of the virtue of a dead man's hand or other belongings,
especially if the man came by a dark and dreadful end; it is but
another form, in fact, of fetish-worship. The tale of the 'Bad Wife'
is a variant of one common to all tongues, relating to matrimonial
troubles and the punishment of a local Hades, the nearest con-
venient pit, or cave, or dark pool, Mare au diable, or "Devil's Punch-
bowl. " The Silesian tale of the 'Sleeping Army' is a variant of a
common tradition which is locally related of King Arthur and his
knights in South Wales.