his own to every object on which his eyes rested in the material universe. His notions about things external to himself would be the direct result of his psychological condition; and for their utterance he would have in language an instrument of boundless power.[1]
- ↑ I do not know that I am called upon to refute or even to notice the paper on Professor Max Müller's "Philosophy of Mythology," contributed by Mr. A. Lang to Fraser's Magazine for August 1881. I can but ask the reader to weigh Mr. Lang's statements carefully and impartially, while I confess for myself that, having read his paper more than once or twice, I can gather from it only the following points: (1) that he objects to Professor Max Müller's sequence of the Rhematic and Mythopœic ages, or to the chronological limits assigned to them; (2) that he looks on the general material of mythology, and not merely on certain portions of it, as lewd, foul, revolting, and unnatural, as the gross growth of disgusting savagery; (3) that he regards this silly, senseless, and obscene talk as consisting of phrases or expressions spoken "directly of the heavenly bodies and powers of nature, conceived of as beings with human passions;" and (4) that the whole multitude of mythical names and the vast fabric of mythical narration has grown up anyhow, like the Lucretian fortuitous concourse of atoms, which has brought us into a world impressed in a very odd way with appearances of design in every part of it; that the legend of Hermes has nothing to do with the wind, that of Prokris nothing to do with the dew, and that of Io and Argos Panoptes nothing to do with the moon and the stars.
As to the value of these conclusions the reader must be judge. I can only say that when we come to anything like a theory in Mr. Lang's paper, it seems (1) to agree very singularly with that of Professor Max Müller; that (2) I do not find in Professor Max Müller's volumes the sharply defined boundaries of a mythopœic age, to which Mr. Lang most strongly objects; that (3) the great bulk of Vedic, Hellenic, or Teutonic myths is not silly, gross, obscene, disgusting, and revolting; and {4) that the attempt to explain the growth of Aryan mythical traditions as the result of accident is worth as much and as little as the attempt to construct a system of astronomy without gravitation.
I cannot bring myself to see any need of going into details. It is enough to note Mr. Lang's remark on the myth of Urvasî and Purûravas. Professor Max Müller had said that the story told of them is one that is true only of the sun and the dawn. Mr. Lang positively denies this, holding the gist of the story to be "merely that Urvasî vanishes, when Purûravas transgresses a point of matrimonial etiquette," "similar etiquette being a common fact in manners from North America to Bulgaria, and round again to South Africa." That it is not so, the reader may perhaps feel satisfied when he has examined the accounts given in this volume of the stories, not of Urvasî only, but of Bheki, Melusina, Psyche, and the multitude of tales of which these may be regarded as the types.
