1
10
3
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/da5ccf363ebdfbed6268cab162a98eb0.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=d1GHzBR5nwJucYQSb8NVv5yo60rZc5AbP7ff01j4MjtMKMz6IgAfXsFQ5p1ozs6d0hhAbYd-b97lcsLCOdBry9DpD0W5tkKYavGqms1J95lMDwk23E5oxR8a7gbDoaxtujR4WutMSMWSpixkf0jzyxY4qzTe2gKz7lASlxqdNT3aLFRvMVhbQM5iJu%7Er%7EFEitpcgjetVlJBgNYQV0mfYmbTKMaUiVLcA9cK-g7wPwZOwez5bCBPHFTg4RQL6PIrwcqRySdiw48EilqHjl4qFsrLv%7EHOV1rvBM2-0TITTTo8z%7EEbmoNgua%7E6paYw4v1WuI26wJZGO%7EKWqMJniD2F%7Egw__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
330b1d109757243237b9cdced172270c
PDF Text
Text
Amongst the rocky Cyclades was a small isiand that by
passing travellers of old was never visited. To the eye of
the Grecian navigator its rugged cliffs appeared to pro
mise a barren surface, unfit for the habitation of man,
and tempted no adventurer to explore the recesses that
lay within. But if any such had climbed the steep granite
precipice,—as my imagination has done,—and had once
safely gained the verdant slope that ascends to the in
land plains, how rich a prospect would have rewarded
the bold attempt!
Never did the glorious sun smile upon a lovelier spot
of earth. Sparkling streams trickled along the green
meadows, or leapt amidst the trees down the steep
ravines, opening into beautiful valleys embosomed in
groves below : where, between the dark cypress and grace
ful olive, glittered the marble dwellings whose light and
stately forms proclaimed their inhabitants to be the sons
of tasteful Greece. The mountain walls of the island rise
highest to the north ; but all around it is encircled by
massive crags,—which, however, are deeply enough cleft
for breezes continually to enter and, hiding amid the
branches, to murmur out tales of sportive malice, about
bewildered boats left tossing outside.
�-■c
■
FTlcwmlw
2
Beautiful Heliados! My subject is the hearts of thy
children, yet I linger in fancy on the verdant summit
of thy plains, and seem bathed in delight at the scene
spread before me. The deep blue sea, dotted with distant
is,lets, sleeps calm o’er the white ridges to south and
west. Dark pines crown the peak that rises high to the
north. But the eastern waves are all dancing in flame,
because soon will the God of light ascend his radiant
car, to lead his splendid course on this day of trium
phant rejoicing. For the day beheld is indeed that on
which Helios attains to his prime glory of solstitial
dominion: the day of annual jubilee to his adorers.
Where was the worship of Helios rendered with purer
and more exclusive honours than on his own island of
Heliados?----- He was to these scholars of nature the One
Supreme Deity; while a secondary homage, and no more,
was paid to the Queen of night and her attendant stars.
The simple cult might seem to show an Eastern origin:
yet this people was undoubtedly sprung from Greece. It
was a colony that had been planted thence in what were
now remote ages, and that consisted of some of the best
and wisest of that land, banished in civic struggle from
their native soil. The children of the first settlers soon for
got the traditions which they had heard from their fathers,
save alone their one ever-memorable legend. The legend,
namely, which related how, when the frail vessel that
bore them was cast wildly about on raging waves, under
heavens all wrapt in storm-clouds, the trembling exiles
prayed to Helios, and He, the gracious God, divided the
clouds, and stood—nay, stood forth in the divine beauty
of his hfiman form, and shot down an arrow before
them into the sea, * whence immediately arose the
rock-bound Heliados. They, singing aloud the praise of
their Deliverer, beat their oars with renewed strength,
and safely moored their bark in a cavern of the island,
* See Grote’s “Greece” Vol. I., p. 327.
.oTtah
-no ana I offv or rerracrauron, w mnn
�3
while the waves contended sullenly in vain against the
outward walls, indignant for their rescued prey.
To Helios the grateful settlers dedicated their new
abode. To Helios their piou3 offspring ascribed all the
blessings that multiplied around them. The high-priest
of Helios was the chief magistrate in their little state :
without whose sanction the deliberations of their repub
lican assemblies never passed into law.
For many generations the contented philosophic race
cultivated their island without a wish beyond. But at
length, as their skill increased, some adventurous youths
were bold enough to explore the seas, and seek out their
parent land. And' thence they brought back to the
wondering Heliadans a glowing report of the arts, and
the science, and, above all, of the gods of Greece. By
the knowledge of the latter the allegiance of some was
nearly drawn aside from their own exclusive Deity.
But the eloquence of the sage Philinos convinced all
hearts anew of the superiority of their own simple faith.
“Zeus, Athene, Heracles,” said he, “are figments of
• tradition; but our God is visibly manifest, pouring down
on us, from his benignant throne, life, light, and bless
ing.” The people heard him with gladness, and pro
claimed afresh with solemn vows that Helios alone was
their God, and that only . Him would they serve.
'
The communication with Greece was closed by the
breaking out of the Persian war. But a new stimulus
had been given to the minds of the inhabitants of
Heliados.
Now see from all sides the white-robed trains that
wind up the highest ascent, emulous to gain a place
nearest to the rounded platform at the top. Here, in
dazzling relief against the black pines that crown the
summit, stands an altar with a semi-circular marble
�_ __ meo.tvmhfir
»
4
alcove, fronting the mid-day sun : to which lead twelve
steps, so numbered from the months of the year.
Foremost the Priests with stately gait lead up the
procession, and range themselves around the altar. Next
follows a troup of young virgins, dedicated to the service
of the temple. Train after train succeeds, till the whole
mountain-side is covered with the band of worshippers,
all robed in white, and garlanded with myrtle or with
flowers. Motionless they stand, till from the glowing
waves emerges the first beam. Then, all arms are raised
aloft, instruments of music give forth a mighty clang, and
as from one voice bursts forth the universal chorus,
“ Ilail to our God, all hail! ”
The chorus swells into full harmony, and lasts until the
full round orb hangs suspended o’er the sea—or, rather,
until Helios has shaken the spray from his golden hair,
and, casting one bright glance along the glittering waves,
springs on in his car of flame to mount the unclouded
heaven.
Then the measure of the music changes. The magnifi
cent hymn subsides into a lighter strain. The multitudes
separate into groups, and around the altar youths and
maidens weave a mazy dance; while song and laughter
resound, and all presents a scene of exuberant but grace
ful mirth. Meanwhile, one individual after another, in
unbroken succession, ascends to the temple, and lays his
offering of fruits or flowers upon the altar, loading the
air with a delicious perfume.
Thus the hours wore on, until the fervid beams of
the mounting sun began to fall too intensely on the ex
posed worshippers. The languid dancers sank on the
heated ground, waving green branches over their heads.
Offerings ceased to be brought, and the songs were grad
ually silenced. Especially within the temple the glare
i5>L-p«
nn HhoioffvorreLracLaLioii, uuv mon
�reflected from the marble walls became intolerable.----- At
a signal from the High Priest, all fell prostrate on the
ground, and a chorus broke forth, solemn and grand, but
subdued and reverential to the degree of extreme awe:—
“Helios! Almighty! We have felt thv power. We adore
thee. The creatures of earth cannot sustain thy glance. Be
merciful in thy majesty!”
When the solemn strain was concluded, the priests led,
and all followed, down the mountain to the shady plains
below, while the virgins sang in cheerful measure,—
" He gave us groves for shelter, and running brooks.’’
Various paths brought the festive crowds again to
assemble on the cool borders of the translucent lake into
which all the tricklings from the mountains discharged
themselves. Here, abundant refreshments were placed,
and, reclined on the soft turf, each indulged himself as
his sportive fancy inclined. For wit and mirth were held
an acceptable homage to the God of light and beauty,
when in this way called forth, and consecrated by the
conscience of his presence. It was thus that sang their
poets, and thus that their priests approved ; for the wor
ship of the Grecian heart was joy. All-comprehensive
must be the homage paid to Him who is Sovereign over
all. Hence also, while the playfulness of lighter spirits
was thus benignly regarded, the graver and the more
philosophic spent the hours of this noontide repose in
the fashion that was their own, of learned converse.
Many a knot was gathered round some favourite sage,
who explained results of scientific research; or hung on
the lips of some traveller returned from Greece, in
structing them in wonders of art, or showing to them
the horrors of military invasion, contrasting with their
own happy tranquility, or, still more appropriately to
the day, giving them cause for a new exulting in the
intelligence and simplicity of their own worship, through
�rTloo.emhp.i’
6
description of idolatrous rites beheld there, to the mul
tiplied deities of the divided land, where gods as much
battled in heaven as their votaries below.
“But where is our Orthinos?” was inquired by many
a disappointed group. “ Has he no new discoveries to
impart to us on this great day of our rejoicing? Who
like him can exalt the praises of Helios, by bringing, as
he has done to us, continually new proof of his mighty
working?”
“See,” said a child, “I have a wondrous gift from
Orthinos. Through it I have seen the beauty of an in
sect’s wing. The master said to me, ‘Behold: thus are
the lowly offspring of earth adorned by the All-bounteous
One.’ He also showed me the secret wonders of fruits
and flowers.”
And in thez group where the priests sat apart, the
Sovereign spoke with displeasure. “Where is Orthinos?
Why addresses he not the people to-day ? ”
“ Sacred Father,” answered an aged priest with mild
and kindly countenance, “thou knowest that Orthinos
is dear to me as an only son. Last night I went to his
dwelling, and found him so deeply plunged in his studies
that he scarcely heeded my entrance. When I bid him
remember the holy assembly of this day, the beam of
his eye, as he looked up, was like that of Helios himself.
He pressed my hand, and words seemed struggling for
utterance; but when I listened as for the inspiration of
the Glorious One, he turned away from me and entreated
me to leave him. I obeyed, for I thought, surely the
God is mighty within him, and he will pour forth his
message to-morrow.”
“ Brother,” said the High Priest, “ I fear we have
erred greatly in our regard to this man. He seeks too
daringly to penetrate the mysteries of heaven. He has
turned his magic instruments to the face of Helios him-
mak-ps no a.noloffvorTe.vr<iCLavroii, mio mniu<.a,
�7
self—not for worship, but in presumptuous curiosity. We
have held our peace, for we deemed him the favourite of
our God. But am not I the accepted minister of Helios ?
And this day he is bold enough to disobey my ordinance.
Henceforth, I will look nearer to this Orthinos.”
“Great King of heaven forbid!” exclaimed Chares.
“ Shall it be suspected that the brightest and noblest son
of Heliados is an enemy to its God!—Is he not the des
cendant of that holy man who denounced the vanity of
the gods of Greece, and first proclaimed the great Helios
for our God alone ? ”
“ Yes: but by the ordinance of that same Philinos was
I appointed the minister of Helios, and the guardian of
his people.”
When the intensity of npon-day heat was past, and
the slanting beams of the descending sun fell with a
milder but a richer glow on the turfy glades, again the
song resounded, and the clang of tymbals woke the
sprightly dance. And as the Monarch sank into his ocean
bed, again did all voices unite in a solemn chorus of
richest harmony,. dying away in soft cadence with the
fading tints of heaven.
Unwilling to disperse, the white bands yet lingered on
the darkened hills:—for loving hearts are closer knit by
the communion of gracious piety. But my fancy now
follows alone the beautiful young maiden that steals
silently away to the depths of a distant grove:—Selene,
whose sweet voice has been trilling like the lark’s, as she has sung in delicious rapture the praises of the God
of day.
In a dark chamber, amidst strange instruments of his
own invention, sits Orthinos. Motionless he has remained
since light vanished out of heaven. Nor yet now is he
aroused by the light step of the maiden as she glides in,
,*
�J" Cl.__ J.,
rnonpmlip.r
8
till her soft arms have been laid about his neck, and she
has whispered,—“ My brother, would’st thou have me
with thee ? ’ ’
Orthinos drew her to his side, and passed his arm around
her.
“So weary and sad!—and all but thee have been so
happy on this' glorious day! Would that thou too----Thou dost shake thy head. Then I know that some dis
covery has rewarded thy labour. Wilt thou not impart
it to me ? ’’
“Ask me not. Do thou rather, my Selene, tell me all
the joy of thy innocent heart.”
“Ah! that my joy could shine out upon thy soul—that
I could reflect on thee, like the Queen of night, all the
gladness that has been mine on this day! Am not I thy
Selene, thy moon, who have received from thee all the
light of my mind?—And oh! my brother, this day when
all were rejoicing in the glory of our G-od, how much
brighter was that glory to me for all thou hast taught me
to know of him. I felt how blest was my lot to be near
unto one so wise.----- Why dost thou sigh ? ”
“ Go on, my sister. Tell me all thou hast felt.”
“ Never have I felt so vividly as this day the living in
fluence of our religion. What would be the light of the
sun to us if we knew not that it was the intelligent smile
of our G-od! As plants collapse and shrivel without his
vital warmth, so would even our souls without the blessed
consciousness of his presence. Every chord of our nature
is struck by him, and, tuned by piety, should respond
like Memnon’s lyre. Our eyes behold him; our senses
feel his genial heat; our souls believe and worship. He
is not a God hidden and unknown, but he suffers us to
behold him as he dwells in mysterious solitude in the blue
expanse of heaven. And though at times he may veil
his form, for anger at our sins, or for trial of our faith,
yet for ever he leaves us a glimmering assurance of his
a
unnino-v oTreiraciaiionroab nrru
�9
presence. And when he dismisses us at night, in order
that our mortal senses may have repose from too constant
a communion with his Divineness, he commits us in
charge to his gentle vicegerent. Here, Orthinos, how has
thy science come in aid of religion. For, while our ances
tors believed that in storm and at night Helios was
departed from us, now we know that it is only our earth,
changeful like its creature man, that then turns itself
away, and that He rests for ever fixed in central repose,
the Unchangeable I—I could smile, but that others believe
them now, at the images which held my infant reverence,
of a throned charioteer, careering round the level earth.
How far more glorious is the revelation of thy science, of
Helios holding-in worlds and worlds by his mighty energy,
as they roll and roll around him, ever ready to dash off
into destruction, if his hand were for an instant relaxed,
—he himself being all the time throned immovably on the
middle point of the universe! ”
“No!----- He moves: Helios too moves!----- Yesterday,
while I was watching him intently, the idea occurred to
me. This day I have re-examined all my evidence, and
I am sure. He does not truly occupy the centre of the
world of planets, but is just so far away from it as should
have been, if they, in their turn, have a power over him,
small but real, of the same kind as is that which he holds
over them. And, if so——”
“And, if so, what then?”
“ If so, he is no longer a God, but he is a world like
our own ! ”----“ The voice of Orthinos uttering blasphemy ! ” exclaimed
Chares, who suddenly entered.
“ Convince him that he is wrong, father,” cried Selene,
as she fell at the old man’s feet. “I am lost, myself,
in a fearful amazement. But you will show to him his
error.”
With eager enthusiasm, the philosopher drew forth his
�rTJonombp.i*
10
charts, and rapidly unfolded the course of his discovery
to the priest, who had been hitherto his admiring scholar,
and repeated the awful result. “Is it not manifestly so ?
Every indication confirms the suspicion that this vast
central power is governed by the same laws that deter
mine our own inferior action, and is therefore of a similar
nature.”
“ I am confounded, and know not how to answer thee,”
returned the simple-minded priest. “ But this I know,
that in thy blind pursuit of science thou art overthrowing
a faith which is supported firmly in every other kind of
way.”
“ Father, I have gone over the whole field of nature,
so far as it lies open before me, but all strengthens me in
the belief that there is a sameness of character in that
bright orb of heaven and this our earth.”
“I speak not of evidence that is of sense, rash Orthinos,
but of the stronger proof that touches straight on the
heart of man.”
“I know not what may serve for conviction to other
hearts ; but I myself am a man, and have listened to the
voice of my own heart; and it tells me that that alone is
adorable which is true.”
“Unhappy deluded one! does thy heart then say that
there is no God?”
“ Not so. On the contrary, all nature proclaims a Cause
that is well thought of as Divine. But I see still that
that Cause is far from such as we have believed.”
“How! A God unseen, unfelt? What is that but the
same as nothing—or, at least, a dim something in which
we have no concern, and is therefore no better to us than
nothing ? ”
“ A heaven without our Helios!” cried Selene. “Cold,
dread order, in the place of intelligence and love! To
believe that day restores us to the sight of him, not by
his loving, paternal will, but as a result of dead necessity,
icftrAH Tin a.nmoyv or
oiiavuwiwx,
�11
—to feel but the sort of warmth we might derive from
earthly fuel,—to see but a lamp in heaven, in place of
that clear revelation of Deity, which through our senses
draws our hearts to a constant living perception of a
power above us !----- And is this, then, the fruit of science :
by the bringing us to nearer vision to annihilate the
glorious mystery which dazzled our imagination, to dis
perse the divine phantoms of our own creation, and show
to us that our heaven is but the magnified reflection of
earth!----- Shall then the faith of man for ever yearn and
strive for a something above him, and for ever by know
ledge be cast back upon himself! ”
“I too have felt this,” said Orthinos, not unmoved.
“ But the light has come to me, and how shall I gainsay
it?”
‘‘Listen to me, my son,” rejoined Chares. “Have the
traditions of our fathers any weight with thee ? ”
“None: I have observed too well how superstition can
invent and disguise.”
“Then I will forbear to speak of these. But thou hast
granted that all nature proclaims a Maker?”
“I have. I believe it.”
“ Thou knowest that light and heat are the means of
all growth—that no chemical change ever happens, not
any blade of grass issues forth, no kind of living being is
formed, and thence is no human soul produced, except
through their ministering agency?”
“All this have my experiments gone to prove.”
“And light and heat come alone from the Sun?”
“ Apparently.”
“ Then is Helios the Author of all good! ”
“Or the Instrument.”
“ Granted, my son,” cried the old man triumphantly.
“ But so immediately, so exclusively the instrument, that
he is, as it were, the right hand of all Godhead, the breath
of its mouth, and the one form which it is pleased to put
�on,—and therefore to us the same as full Deity, being
that which is all that we can know of it.”
“Nay, but I have confident expectation that by search
ing I shall truly find out more.”
“Believe it not. Once quitting this safe and certain
ground, a cold and dead negative alone will lie before thee.
And for this thou wilt abandon the warm and cheering
faith which animates the heart and rouses up the virtue
of worshippers ; which lifts their eyes from a grovelling
on this base earth to the ennobling contemplation of
heaven.----- Interrupt me not. I read what thou would’st
say. Who of the Heliadans has gazed upon heaven like
thee? But oh! my son, to look upon heaven with bold
inquiring eye, feeling that thy spirit is master of its
secrets, and that heavenly bodies only lie as it were
beneath thee, to be investigated,—what is this but a
making of thyself the God thou worshippest ? And how
different, how incomparably more becoming to a mortal
being, is the state of mind where the adoring believer
bows consciously himself, before acknowledged Higher
Being, seeing and feeling that he himself is ever subject
to the inspection of Divinity.”
“ Father,” returned Orthinos after a pause, “ there is
much weight in your appeal. I feel there is a moral
difficulty to overcome.”
“Give heed to it, my son: give heed to it. Ponder it
in thy heart; and above all beware that thou disturb
not the faith of others.”
“I will not, while a doubt remains to my own mind.
Too much already I have perhaps said. My Selene, go
thou with this kind father, and let him pour comfort
into thy heart.”
“I will not leave thee, my brother. But oh! father,
bless me still in the name of Helios,” exclaimed the weep
ing girl as she knelt before Chares.
“ May Helios beam into thy soul, my daughter, and
�13
disperse thy doubts as he chaseth the mists of night.
For thee, Orthinos ”—and the old man hesitated and
shuddered, “I dare not say, may Helios bless thee!”
Chares hastened away, and as he passed through the
midnight shade of the grove, the thought of his mind
was a trembling rejoicing that this blasphemy had not
been uttered in the face of day.
With early dawn Selene left her restless couch that
she might go forth, and meet the first glance of rising
Deity. But in passing by the apartment where her brother
was wont to study she stopped, for she saw that he re
mained still seated as she had left him over-night. There,
amid his charts and instruments, he was slumbering with
a smile upon his lips like a happy infant. Selene bent
over him, and dropped a gentle kiss on his large smooth
brow. Orthinos awoke, and the clear soul that beamed
from his eyes seemed full of noble confidence, as of one
that has been in communion with lofty' thoughts. The
ruddy dawn shone into the chamber as Selene extinguished
the flickering lamp; and with one consent the brother
and young sister issued forth.
She looked inquiringly in his face as she turned their
steps to the accustomed hill.----- “ Whither thou wilt.”
In silence they mounted the hill and turned to the
crimson east.----- “ For worship, brother?” murmured the
maiden.
“ Yes, Selene, for worship :—here,—everywhere. Wher
ever we turn, new wonders unfold themselves, beyond the
feeble ken of man. Never was my soul so tuned to wor
ship as now that I seem to have first opened my eyes
upon the miracles of nature. Last night, Selene, as I
pursued my researches, schemes of such vastness of con
ception dawned on me as almost dazzled my imagination.
As yet they are no more than faint gleams; but I shall
trace them into the boundless space before me.”
�“And leave behind thy religion and thy God! What
then shall science avail thee ! ”
“No! if my science be true,—and, I think, none can
prove it false,—that which we have been adoring is no
God, and his worship is superstition, not religion.”
“Whom, what, then shall we worship?”
“ That yet is unknown. But do not shrink from the
idea. He does not the less exist, because we are not yet
able to discern Him.----- 1 will confess to thee that at first,
when it seemed to me truly that the'Maker was annihilated
from creation, I felt dismayed: as if the universe were
suddenly dead, without a soul. But I re-consider, and
find that it is our imagination about Him, not Himself,
that in reality is departed. And though He is yet to seek,
all the proofs we have ever had of His being still remain
as much as ever in full force.”
“But oh1 if invisible, if no object of sense, it seems to
me that He can be no object of love !----- Brother, are
the arguments of Chares without weight ? ”
“Not entirely so. The practical worth of any doctrine
is a testimony in its favour.
The moral value found
in it ought to serve as a guard against our rashly aban
doning it. But it cannot prove, nor can anything prove,
that it is criminal to seek for more knowledge; and much
less can it impugn the claim on us which is that of any
knowledge once surely gained. The really good must be
inevitably at one with the really true. But how can we
know under what influence the old ideas may have sprung
forth, which now are clothed with the sacred form of
religion, and which, having been received as such, have
twined themselves about the deepest and the dearest parts
of our nature—nay, which indeed have by a beautiful
sublimation in character become actually that which they
at first but pretended to be ?
I have spoken to thee of
successive eras in the formation of our globe ;—so, in the
progress of humanity, has religious faith taken stand on
�15
different stages, as new layers of moral civilization have
spread over the rude mental world; and in each success
ive case, no sooner have the flooding waters subsided than
life newly has shot from every pore, fresh verdure has
covered the rocky bed, and a glad creation has arisen as
if it were to endure for ever 1
How ruthless appears to
us, the ephemeral creatures of earth, the destruction that
has repeatedly swept over it, appearing as if destined to
hurl nature back into chaos:—instead of which, each in
stance of destruction has brought it to onward stages of
perfection. Even so it is painful to break up old forms
of religion—to tear away from the heart its long-cherished
associations. Even so is there destruction for a while, in
partial measure, to even morality and virtue. But fear not
in the end for either virtue or religion. These truly are
divine—divine in themselves. They are immortal energies,
inseparable from true human nature, however the facile
images they have been decked in by rude invention may
truly prove destined to perish.”
Orthinos paused, for Helios was breaking forth from
the waves. It was the signal at which all Heliadans were
wont to fall prostrate, and worship. Selene threw her arms
around hei- brother. He pressed her to his bosom, and
together they watched the noblest spectacle of nature.
“ Glorious is that beam,” said the philosopher, “ but
more glorious to me, Selene, was the light that broke in
upon my mind, when the thought flashed on me of the
wondrous balance on which are worlds poised in the
real heaven.”
They descended the hill, and Selene felt that there was
a power in her brother’s soul on which she could rest,
even as she hung upon his arm for bodily support.
Orthinos returned to his study, and the maiden wandered
alone. Alone! yes, Selene felt that she was indeed alone!
She sought the thickest groves, and if a sunbeam crossed
�JL £L
rTJpnornbftr
16
her path., she shrank aside. But the shades were oppres
sive, and seemed to her like the mansion of death. And
when the voices of distant virgins, chanting their morn
ing hymn to Helios, were borne to her on the breezes,
Selene wept. Yet not in thought did she reproach her
brother that he had revealed to her truths too vast and
stern for her weaker soul.
She gloried in his superior
mind. She felt her own enlarged : for hers was of the
kindred nature which could receive, if not originate;
it could appreciate and admire, if it could not itself
accomplish, the daring and undeviating pursuit of truth.
Hers too was the love that would share in all things. He
could not lead, where she was unwilling to follow. But,
now, as a thousand images of home-nourished association
crowrded into her mind, she felt as if the pathway before
her were a drear and barren wilderness, beyond which,
if there lay a fairer home, her strength might fail to
reach it. He, her guide, it appeared to her, was now to
be her all, in earth and heaven.
Meanwhile the youths who were accustomed to be taught
by Orthinos, lamented that he came not forth. Still by
these, who respected his retirement, he was left in quiet.
Nevertheless, it was not long that his study was undis
turbed. For the High Priest sent Chares to summon
him to the royal presence.
Orthinos prayed his friend that he might delay till he
had finished the calculation in which he was plunged.
Bnt the command was imperative, and reluctantly he
obeyed. “ The Ruler of our Isle,” he said, “ has a right
to know the doctrines that are promulgated among his
people ; and I am willing to explain to him, as to all
Heliadans, the discoveries that have opened themselves
to me.”
“ I beseech thee, forbear I Dost thou not perceive that
these notions of thine are utterly subversive, not only of
Tin H.T1UIOH V vr ’
vciutvii,
�17
the religion, but of the whole government of our Isle ;
and that therefore thou must appear to the Ruler, not
only as an impious blasphemer, but also as a rebel ? ”
The idea was startling to Orthinos. For, wholly im
mersed as he had been in his discoveries, he had never
yet contemplated this consequence.
“Be guided by me, my son,” urged the old man, with
tears of earnest affection.
“ Keep these thoughts all
within thy own breast.”
“It is impossible! For all will come and question me
—unless, indeed, I be shut up, or banished from commu
nion with men.----- 1 have no wish to interfere with the
government of our Isle.
We have lived freely and
happily under the paternal sway of our Priest.----- Yet,
I bethink me, this was owing to the cause that our
religion gave its sanction to the yoke, whence voluntarily
was it that we bent to it. I see that if truly our faith
be changed, nought can hinder but that discord and
rebellion will follow.----- -Even so was it, father, that in
the realm of my own nature were discord and rebellion
also stirred. But not for these, nevertheless, did I swerve
from my course. Nor will I now, from any fear of what
may happen to others. For them and me, I am per
suaded, there is no better guide than honest truth.”
Chares would have urged farther, but reverence for
his Sovereign, and religion towards his God, restrained
his lips.
Boldly, but without defiance, Orthinos made his con
fession before the High Priest; and, subsequently, before
the assembled chiefs of the island. Horror and dismay
were in all hearts, contending with the esteem in which
he was universally held, as the wisest of their learned
men. Hitherto, it had never happened in Heliados that
any shedding of blood should appear needful at the bar
of justice. But this was an unheard-of crime; and how
�18
should they arrest its fearful contagion from spreading
amongst the people? dhey would gladly have imposed
silence, and left the inflicting of punishment to the offended
Deity himself. But little would this avail. “ Know,”
said Orthinos, “that the way of science which I have
opened to multitudes of young inquiring minds will lead
also them to the same end that I have gained. In spite
of any endeavours to stop the current of thought, my
example will be repeated a hundred fold Yes, surely as
the light of another morrow will succeed on the darkness
of night, will truth arise on other souls as it has arisen
on mine.”
“He has spoken to his own condemnation,” said the
High Priest. “It is true that even now are there rumours
afloat of impiety diffused among the people. And we
must therefore set a warning before them to restrain
them from following his example. The denier of Helios
must die 1 ”
Thus the deliberations of the day were ended. And
at midnight the prisoner was left for the few short hours
of darkness to feel the unutterable cruelty of his doom.
He prayed that for one year,—one month,—he might enjoy
the precious boon of life. He prayed, at least, that this
night they would allow him his instruments and papers,
that he might finish the scheme on which he had entered.
But the judges—the priestly judges—were inexorable ; and
he repressed the deep anguish of his soul. All access
to his polluting presence was denied. Selene had been
committed to the charge of Chares, who was rendered
responsible that she should neither imbibe nor propagate
the impiety of her brother.
A third morning dawned on Heliados. And once more
the people assembled in crowds on the temple mountain.
But it was not now for joy and exulting worship. On
this day is a sacrifice to be rendered to the Mighty One: —
Tna.KeN nu nruivcr
'i
. 1
I
I
■
|
I!
|
�19
a crowning act of homage, but one of which the memory
will embitter all the worship to follow after.
Again arises Helios, glorious and unclouded in his
majesty. But a blighting mist is already filling the moral
atmosphere that will speedily dim for ever the faith of
his votaries.
The people whispered amongst one another in won
dering indefinite alarm till the white band of priests
appeared and wound up the ascent. Then an utter con
sternation seized on all, for as the priests opened their
ranks, and stood around the altar, they discovered in
the midst their Orthinos! The Sovereign Pontiff stood
forth, and with hand out-stretched towards the God
of day, commanded in the name of Helios that all
should listen.
“This man whom I have sanctioned to teach, and
from whom ye have loved to learn, has become a blas
phemer of our God. While the hearts of all his country
men have been glowing with a loving and grateful homage
to their Founder and Preserver, he has buried himself in
darkness with the spirits of darkness, and has only come
forth to deny the very being of our Helios. What fiery
indignation, what plagues, may not the offended God
hurl down on us, if we suffer this great criminal to dwell
amongst us unpunished ! Wherefore I have commanded
him to be brought here, that he may either worship,
or die.”
rl hen all fixed their eyes with trembling horror on the
prisoner, waiting breathless for his reply.
“I have found that Helios is no God, and I cannot
worship him.”
“Ye have heard his blasphemy, 0 Heliadans. Lift up
your voices with me, and deprecate the wrath of the
Mighty One from falling on us also.”
And the people obeyed, while at the signal of their
Sovereign the priests bound Orthinos to the altar; placing
�XILan<a.mheiy
20
at his feet the instruments of his science, the fruits of
the labour of his life, doomed also to destruction.
‘‘Thus,” said the High Priest, “we commend to Helios
his own victim. In darkness has this sin been engen
dered : let him now feel the potency of the God, warm
and gracious at first, but increasing to fierce overpower
ing might. Until noon shall he remain, in order that
perchance the God may have mercy on him, and touch
his heart.”
Orthinos would have spoken to the people, but they
were bidden to retire out of hearing of his voice, “ in
order,” it was said, “ that he might commune with
Helios alone.”
But there was one whom no command could force to
retire. On the steps of the altar knelt Selene, her
appalled guardian at her side. The woeful interval had
been passed by them in alternate efforts on his part to
console the maiden, and to renew her shaken faith. Now,
in the weariness of her intense sorrow there was but one
thought that remained to her:—“If Helios be a God, he
will spare my godlike brother.” And the vehemence of
this assurance still upheld her.
The hours moved slowly on, and the heat became more
and more intense, so that those that stood within the
temple sickened and grew faint. And yet no cloudy veil
was spread in mercy, no breeze was made to fan the
heavy air. The fire of heaven burned fiercely, as if with
indignant ire.
The shadow of the altar dwindled till it fell only on
the very centre of the alcove.
Then the Pontiff once
more approached, and addressed his victim. “Dost thou
now adore the Omnipotent Helios ? ”
Orthinos raised his languid head, and once more cast
a glance around on the exquisitely-beautiful landscape,
—on the many well-loved ones whose hearts were now
agonizing for him,—on her, chiefly, who was the nearest
�21
and best loved. And his soul shrank from the blank
region of death, the dread expanse without a shore and
without a God:—and it struggled convulsively for life.
But on this side was a Lie. And his lips uttered the
firm resolve, “ Let me die I ”
Then the priests drew from amongst his instruments a
clear transparent circle, by the aid of which he had been
wont to regard the heavens. “ With this,” said the High
Priest, “ has he lifted presumptuous gaze to the mysteries
of heaven. Behold, what shall happen when the God in
like manner looks down upon him! ”
And they held it over the head of the victim. The
glowing beams were concentrated on his brow and pierced
direct to his brain. Sense and life were instantaneously
extinguished, and the stricken frame held Orthinos no
more.
What should have followed for a people thus robbed
of their noblest teacher but a bitter season of contention,
between those who admired him and those who con
demned:—between those who would have saved him with
their lives, and those who abhorred him with all their
souls ?
I see the image of my unhappy Selene, after she had
passed through the paroxysm of her anguish, reviving some
what into a gentle consolation, through the force of her
pure instincts. Her thoughts hovered ceaselessly over
the region where the spirit of her brother was now a
sojourner. Faith grew up for her out of love, and her
loving faith created or discovered a Heaven. Nor was
it long ere thither also her own spirit followed.
For the G-od-deprived island in general, however, in
creasing discord and increasing persecution raged long in
the manner of ujiholy demons:—until at last a great
�rT)dp.f>mhfir
22
solution was evolved. The conviction was brought forth
into a ripe truth, that undoubtedly is the soul of man
in itself a surer medium for the manifesting of Deity
than any exhibitor of mere physical glory.
And it
happened therefore, inevitably, that the repentant and
grateful countrymen of Orthinos turned to worship him
self as their God.
. With this consummation the history of the Heliadans
closed. Shortly after, their island was submerged by an
earthquake.
Sara S. Hennell.
Hackney, November, 1846.
�[This little tale is now printed with a view to private use.
The date attached to the manuscript copy is retained as a
necessary index; but none the less, as requires to be ack
nowledged, has the original version been subjected through
out, under present revision, to some measure of correction
of a slight kind.
The passage from Grote’s “Greece” which is referred to,
and which was the obvious source of the whole story’s com
position, is the following:----“After leaving Corcyra, the Argo was overtaken by a perilous storm
near the island of Thera: the heroes were saved from imminent peril by
the supernatural aid of Apollo, who, shooting from his golden bow an
arrow which pierced the waves like a track of light, caused a new island
suddenly to spring up in their track and present to them a port of refuge.
The island was called Anaphe; and the grateful Argonants established
upon it an altar and sacrifices to Apollo jEgletes, which were ever after
wards continued, and traced back by the inhabitants to this originating
adventure.”
8. 8. H.]
COVENTRY, March, 1884.
CURTIS AND BEAMISH, PRINTERS, COVENTRY.
�---- —"-- -—“--- “
------f---- .— 2*. Cl
rTianomllP.r
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Heliados a mythical legend
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Hennell, Sara Sophia
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: Coventry
Collation: 22, [1] p. ; 19 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Printed by Curtis and Beamish, Coventry. Date of publication from KVK.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
[s.n.]
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1884
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
CT61
Subject
The topic of the resource
Mythology
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Heliados a mythical legend), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Language
A language of the resource
English
Conway Tracts
Legends
Mythology
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/2ab260f3d4bae53a5437586eebef32bf.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=LN-COsVywRmNmPlpAlVLDW4klfGwgGZ0k7ydp436nDw9cYS%7EyHXUKm4-Lgniw%7EORVSzKCv7HUpmP%7E2y3tiwQqnXKfnpBjHKVKpPVhN2Q88IFtjZVnnmr%7E2f0YNKzM9ETTphH8BtyaV0MYlnrYCaAj9WV0qIABXVm1Uxs-dwGi4bbqem6G8jmYaE1PFkv8FUYEC7zEP1X3ZfzTH4zsEpYhFv-LsQC4rXdiZlLNMIb0yZNBPithIh1Y0j3qtaU5P6MDI0cQATK6dbtn8-lyfpqaSGwp%7Eih-EPKK25lkTcjkteK0AWxx2v%7Ec-bcaRDqZ0s6NOj6C3JxyKXx1cxG9Wh%7E1w__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
5216a45ccfd779b4d55b10b6c67b7a4c
PDF Text
Text
32
The Chanson de Roland.
been accidental, while both are really inaccurate. Our object
will be attained, however, if, in consequence of what we have
written, the necessity of a joint employment of the two processes
of observation and a priori reasoning, is more clearly kept in
view in future discussions of the subject. What educational
system will prove itself the best, it is impossible to predict; but
that the best will ultimately prevail, when the “struggle for life”
between the various kinds of schools is ended, does not admit of
a doubt. Meanwhile we protest against a resuscitation of the
policy of “levelling-up,” which has been finally exploded in
reference to ecclesiastical establishments, and its application to
education. We claim for private schools no State support
obtained by fresh taxation, nor a share in endowments already
existing, but simply that recognition of their importance which
they justly demand as their due.
Art. II.—The Chanson de Roland.
Le Chanson de Roland, texte critique accompagne d’une tra
duction nouvelle et precede d’une Introduction Historique.
Par L£on Gautier. Tours. 1872.
N quo proelio Eggihardus, regiae mensae praepositus, Anselmus
comes palatii, et Hruodlandus Britannici limitis praefectus, cum aliis compluribus interficiuntur.” This sentence of
Eginhard, the courtier and chronicler of Charles the Great, is
the only line in all history that contains the name of Roland.
Yet a later writer of the next reign, known as “ L’Astronome,”
might well say of the hero and his peers, “ quorum quia nomina
vulgata sunt, dicere supersedi.” Legend is capricious and has
her favourites, who are not those of history ; phantoms that have
secured a renown as real and as immortal as the real men among
whom posterity sees them move. Thus, three centuries after his
death at Roncevaux, it was the song and the name of Roland
that were chanted at Hastings, when Taillefer rode out before
the Norman line. He has become the mediaeval Achilles, “ risen
invulnerable from the stream of Lethe, not of Styx,” a figure
at which Time can throw no dart. Even the glory of Charles
pales before that of the Warden of the March of Britanny ; the
great Emperor becomes like Arthur or Agamemnon, a crowned
shadow, remote, withdrawn, while the epic of the heroic age of
the West is “ La Mort Roland.” His name has gone out to
the ends of the earth, and wherever he passes, he leaves traces of
sword-blows,like thunder-strokes; and footsteps more than human.
I
�The Chanson de Roland.
33
The immense gorge that splits the Pyrenees under the towers
of Marbore was cloven at one blow of Roland’s blade Durandal ;
Francis I. lifted the stone of his sepulchre at Blayes, and mar
velled, like Virgil’s labourer, at those mighty bones of ancient
men. Italy is full of relics of his renown, his time-worn statue
guards the gate of the Cathedral at Verona ; Pavia shows his
lance, and at Rome Durandal is carven on a wall of the street
Spada d’Orlando. In Germany he rides through the forests,
melancholy as Diirer’s mysterious knight; on the Rhine he built
the tower of Rolandseck, and distant echoes of him are heard
in vaguest tradition through India to the snows of Tartary.
In Paradise Dante beholds his soul, with that of Charles,
pass, “a double star, among the central splendours of the
Blessed/’*
How did so wide and permanent a glory gather round this
figure ? what portion of his legend is historical, what mere fan
tasy ; what the shreds of old mythology, fallen from the limbs
of forgotten gods of the North, and woven into a garment
whereby we see this forgotten man ? M. Ldon Gautier has
done much to present clearly and so far to solve, the difficulties
of these questions, in his new and splendid edition and transla
tion of the Chanson de Roland. M. Gautier’s task has been a
long one, fulfilled with a conscientious love of the Iliad of the
warlike West. But before the poem itself can be epjoyed, there
is much to be done : an iron and rugged language to be mas
tered, a history of the growth of the epic to be studied, a con
ception of the society whereof it is the one literary charm and
treasure to be attained to.
The first part of this labour M. Gautier has made light enough.
He furnishes a text, based on that of the oldest, the Bodleian
MS., which is not earlier than the middle of the eleventh, nor
later than the first part of the twelfth century. This text is
aided by collations of the Venice and Paris MSS., and is printed
more in accordance with the best grammar of the period than
that which the careless scribe of the Oxford version chose to
employ. Further, M. Gautier has filled up the lacunae of the
Oxford text with remaniements from the foreign sources, trans
lated back into the earlier style of the Bodleian copy ; but these
hazardous emendations are confined among the notes. In the
translation he has avoided the pedantry of M. Genin, who
turned the style of the eleventh into that of the sixteenth cen
tury—and has given a line for line version in modern French
prose.
Thus the epic can be read, but scarcely as yet appreciated.
* Paul de S. Victor, “ Hommes et Dieux.”
[Vol. C. No. CXCVII.}—New Seeies, Vol. XLIV. No. I.
D
�34
The Chanson de Roland.
There are works of art, masterpieces in their way, which ap
peal in vain to unaccustomed eyes or ears. The impassive atti
tude of an Egyptian Sphinx, the archaic lines of 2Eginetan
sculpture, the low relief of early Italian marbles, the thin
luxuriance and artifice of the age of the Pompadour, are enigmas
to all who cannot see in these the forces of society, of thought,
of life, of which they were the fruit, the ultimate ex
pression. We must have lived in imagination with the old
Egyptians, in a changeless land of peoples obedient to the dead ;
we must have felt the struggle in the Greek or Florentine
heart, between a keen new sense of the grace of things, and a
sense, not less constraining, of the religious traditions in art;
we must have fleeted the time carelessly with Manon Lescaut,
passing delicately over the volcanic crust of society, before certain
lovely creations of art can yield the intimate secret of their love
liness. Indeed, of what art is this not true, save of the mirror
which the Academy or the Salon holds up to the dress and
manners of the day ? And even this in a hundred years will
require a historical attitude, of a mind as keen as that of Charles
Baudelaire, to see the beauty of artifice and decadence, before it
will find an admirer. The Frankish epic of Roland is the only
beautiful thing in literature that survives from an age that, save
to one or two historians, seems to have only the darkness, and
none of the fruitfulness, of Chaos and of Night. We can only
admire it, when we find that that epoch was indeed heroic, and
not the scene of a “ mere fighting and flocking of kites and
crows.” Here then is a poem of more than four thousand lines
in length, telling of the events of two or three days, and giving
to these events colossal proportions altogether unwarranted by
history. How far is the action historical ? Was there ever a
battle with the Saracens, a heavy discouragement for Charles,
fought in the passes of the Pyrenees ? Are the Paladins mere
fictitious and gigantic ancestors of the later feudal houses, or
exaggerated pictures of real peers ; or have the stories of old gods
been attached to new names, and is Roland with his sword of
sharpness and wondrous horn, the Norse Hrodo, or a myth of
the Sun ; is his love, Lady Aide, one of the maidens of the Dawn ?
Next, how did the epic come to have the shape it has, rough
indeed, yet massive, in verse too ponderous to be lyrical. It
cannot be a mere collection of people’s songs, it has not the light
measure of the Kalevala, or of the Romaic Tragoudia, or of the
Scotch or Provencal ballad. Is it then the work of some monk,
who in that grey dawn of the first Renaissance may have tasted
of the stolen waters of the Magician Virgilius ? Or is it the soDg
of a wandering jongleur, chanted in village streets ? Or is it
only one out of the countless crowd of feudal romances, composed
�The Chanson de Roland.
35
by known authors, for a kind of literary public, between the
eleventh and the fourteenth centuries? Probably it falls under
none of these descriptions. Not lyrical, with no touch of clas
sical influence, not vulgar in tone, the poem is a true chanson
de geste, a family lay, grown together under the hands of a
succession of the minstrels nurtured by a noble house, and
ultimately it has received written form at the hands of one of
these.
Again, what manner of men were they who found in the
Paladins their heroes, and in this poem their epic ? How much
memory had they of the Roman culture, and of the Olympian
gods ? what did they know of the new monotheism of Arabia,
what survivals of heathenism did they retain ? What beginnings
of chivalry were there among them, what remains of barbarism ?
In what were they like, and in what unlike the sons of the
Achaeans, among whom the older and lovelier epics came into
existence ? Some of these questions need to be considered before
the poem is approached, some of them the poem itself answers.
First, with regard to what Mr. Max Muller calls the “ grits of
local history,” which sometimes exist at the centre of a myth,
and refuse to yield to the keenest instruments of the mythologist.
Here there rises one form, as later another, of the endless
Homeric question. In the case of Homer no one can doubt that
there was a great empire at Argos, a great capital at Mycenae,
and few can refuse to see in the Iliad traces of a war more
human than the struggle between light and darkness. Yet it is
only here and there a student of Professor Blackie’s type who
believes in a real Achilles, a real Helen ; and most readers must
rest in the opinion that the prehistoric civilization of Argos left a
genuine though vague memory, which became a nucleus for
myth and tradition of various date and origin, and scarcely of
estimable historical value. Just so it is with the historical part
of the Frankish epic. We know that in 778 the rear-guard of
Charles’s army was cut off by mountaineers in the Pyrenees, as it
returned from an unsuccessful attempt on Saragossa. But we
have no reason to believe that the Saracens aided in the attack,
and we are certain that the prodigious feats of Roland and his
companions, the echoes of the “dread horn/’ the edge of
Durandal, the angelic apparition, are as unhistorical as
the vision of Pallas to Achilles. Ganelon too, the traitor, is of
the race of JEgistheus, and the whole epic is full of the common
places and stock characters of primitive imagination. Yet
it does not follow that because much is impossible and super
natural, and the tale one of defeat and death, the poem is a
mere version of a Solar myth.
The school of mythologists who see all tradition in the sun
�36
The Chanson de Roland.
as Malebranche saw all things in God, have not spared the glory
of Roland. There are two attacks, one scientific and one popular,
on the hero’s identity. The first is the theory of Dr. Hugo’
Meyer, according to whom the Chanson sets forth a myth blended
of memories of the twilight of the gods, and of the real disaster
at Roncevaux. Thus the name of the traitor Ganelon is resolved
into Gamal, gamal is translated old, Old is an epithet of the
mythical Wolf of the Edda, the Wolf is Twilight, for Twilight is
grey and swallows the light. This equation worked out, it
is plain to any unbiassed mind that Roland, the foe of Ganelon,
must be the God Hrodo fighting the Wolf Fenris. In point of
fact, Roland does not fight Ganelon, who is his stepfather, and
certainly regards him in a stepfatherly way. The only real
refutation of the solar theory, as M. Gaston Paris has observed,
is a parody, or a sneer. Any battle, the life of any hero, may be
twisted into a parable of day and night. But M. Paris has
proved that in this case Ganelon is saved from being the wolf by
the laws of language, which do not permit the conversion of
Gamal into Guenes, or Ganelon. Besides, there is no d priori
reason why a Christian and Frankish aristocracy of the ninth
century should desert their own stock of Christian mythology for
that of Scandinavia. Mr. Cox, another advocate of the Sun,
has nothing to say of Hrodo, or Gamal, but thinks that Roland’s
sword of sharpness, his invulnerable strength, his horn, and his
lady Aide, who dies at the tidings of his death, identify him
with Herakles, Achilles, Sigurd, Arthur, all the heroes who are
absorbed in the centre of our system. Perhaps the super
natural element in the epic is more easily accounted for by the
usual, and apparently necessary forces of the primitive imagina
tion. Whatever the will may be, in primitive man the imagi
nation is bond, and the seemingly wildest fancies of remote races
go an unvarying round of events, characters, very often of verbal
formulae.
As to the supernatural occurrences, Guibert de
Nogent, or any chronicler of the eleventh century, tells stranger
marvels. Roland’s arms are not those of the Sun/the lucida tela
diei, they are gifts of no god more celestial than Wiinsch or
Wish, the old German God of Desire. Whatever the childlike
imagination craves, caps of darkness, nebel-cappe, shoes of swift
ness, swords of sharpness—with these it equips its favourite
heroes. The Chanson is just as historic as the Iliad ; it tells of a
war in which little is certain save that the contending parties
were great hostile races.
Supposing that three centuries were enough for the one tragic
incident in Charles’s career to bear fruit in the popular imagina
tion, it would certainly be sung of in the ballads of the people,
and the question occurs, Is the Chanson a pastiche of popular
�The Chanson de Roland.
37
songs ? And here the likeness to the Homeric controversy recurs,
for the Homeric epics, too, are felt to have some relation to the
ballad style. That ballads existed among the Franks there can
be no doubt at all. Charles himself is known to have collected
the ancient volks-lieder of Germany. In the biography of S.
Faro, a work of the ninth century, mention is made of a ballad
on one of Clotaire’s victories—a ballad sung by girls in the
dance. The biographer of S. William of Gellone, too, writing in
the eleventh century, talks of the chori juvenum who sung of
his hero. A yet earlier, and still extant ballad, is that of Donna
Lombarda, Rosamond, the wife of Alboin. These ballads were
contemporary with the events they recorded, and no doubt such
ballads must have contained the popular view of the disaster at
Roncevaux. These would be portions of truly popular poetry, of
that spontaneous song which in Corsica and Modern Greece, and
Russia still—as of old all over Europe—formed the culture of the
*
people.
These songs in all lands express delight at the return
of spring, or record the aspect in which, as through deeps of still
water, some tragical event of the moving world of men appears
to the indolent eyes of peasants; or they give voice to joy or
sorrow at bridal or burial, or weave into melody some one of
the primitive stock of folk-stories. These are all of the nature
of true popular poetry, but these must not be confused with epic.
It is this mistake which has led to attempts at Homeric transla
tion in ballad metre and ballad commonplace. The epic is of its
nature not popular, but aristocratic and artistic, and sings of the
ancestors of a settled aristocracy. Thus in Greece the Lityerses
song, or the Rhodian song of the swallow, was popular; the
aristeia of Diomede, or of Achilles, were primarily the property
(the chansons de geste'), of the houses of Crete or Larissa. How,
then, was the epic formed ? how was the advance made from the
lyric versicle to the ornate chronicle in verse ? Looking at the
epics either of Greece or France, it is plain that they contain
survivals of the characteristic formulae of ballads. These are
textual repetitions of speeches, recurring epithets, as “ the green
grass,” “ the salt sea foam
in Homer, opta aKiotvra; in
Roland, coupes d’or cler, L’Emperes d la barbe chenue ; also
the curious practice of lavishing gold and silver on common
articles of everyday use. One might say, then, that artistic poetry
grew like the manor out of the folk-land, like religion out of the
worship of recognised ancestral spirits, instead of strange objects
at large ; that even so in art, an aristocracy found popular poetry a
* Cf. Mr. Ralston’s “ Songs of the Russian PeopleM. Rathery’s article
in the Revue des Deux Mondes ; M. Nigra’s and M. Pitre’s “ Popular Songs of
Italy.”
�38
The Chanson de Roland.
field unenclosed, and employed ministers of its own—retainers,
who became a profession, with a hereditary collection of artistic
rules, to perpetuate the memory of forefathers. These minstrels
would naturally retain much of the simple formulae of the folk
song ; but with practice, with an audience that had plenty of
leisure, would add to the early simplicity the length, fire, con
tinued majesty of the epic. This would, lastly, be written out, and
become a model, from which a later class of singers degenerated.
If this account of the growth of a chanson de geste be a correct
one, we need not look, like M. Gautier, for fragments of ballads
in the separate stanzas. M. Gautier, like many Homeric critics,
thinks he can discern various short lays in the Dream of Charles,
the Death of Aide, the battle-scene, and so on. But these, with
their dramatic propriety, as necessary links in the poem, cannot
have been composed as chance snatches of song. The girls of
Lorraine in the present century still sung of Ogier, but the
ancient ballad was a light lyric, in nothing like the stanza
of Roland.
*
Who then may have been the genius, the Homeros, who gave
unity to the traditions of Roncevaux ? Two answers at least
may be rejected. He was not one of the lower jongleurs, who
got his living by singing through villages. A village audience
could have neither time nor appreciation to give to such
a poem ; though in Finland, through the enforced idleness of
the long winter nights, the peasantry have developed the
Kalevala, an epic of their own. Lastly, the composer of the
“ Chanson de Roland ” can scarcely, as a writer in the Quarterly
Review supposes, “ have been acquainted with the great models
of Roman literature.” t Where the feudal approaches the
classic epic, it is by virtue of its native force and heroic quality,
not by the patches of mythological allusion and faded rhetoric
with which the contemporary, Abbo, garnishes his verses on the
siege of Paris by the Normans. Nor is the religious tone at all
that of the learned monk. What monks made of Roland we
see in the chronicle of the Pseudo Turpin, where the hero is a
military pietist, not the Baron who holds up in death his
gauntlet to God.
We may set aside, then, the village jongleur, and the monk
of letters, and consider “ Roland” a real “ family song,” chanson
de geste. Looking further down history, we find a school of
cyclic poets in France, occupied with glorifying the heroic houses
of Lorrain, of Rousillon, at the expense of Charles, the ancestor
of the royal line, and the typical enemy of the feudal revolt.
* “ Romancero Champenois.”
f Quarterly Review, vol. cxx., p. 287.
�The Chanson de Roland.
39
In the hands of this school Charles is degraded, just as the
characters of Menelaus and Odysseus were by the poets of
republican Greece.
“ Roland ” is to such a poem as “les fils d’Aymon,” as the
“Iliad” is to the “ Orestes ” of Euripides. Even in Roland the
king is not the most prominent figure; but as the influence of
the leudes of the later Carlovingdans grew stronger, he becomes
the faineant that even the latest of his race in Laon never
were.
Later still, the cyclic epics lost all hold on history, became poems
of fantasy, like “ Huon of Bordeaux,” the mediaeval Odyssey.
Still later came Celtic and Provencal influences, the chivalry
and faerie of the court of Arthur, and Roland was only remem
bered in the chap books of peasants, and the burlesque of
Ariosto. Other poems of the early date must have existed, for
they are referred to in the “ Chanson” just as the “ Iliad ” refers
to lost songs ; but of this class, the great Chanson alone remains
tn testify to a heroic age and an epic genius among the Franks.
So far, there is a tolerably complete parallel between the
Homeric and the mediaeval epopee. Both retain traces and
survivals of an earlier genre of poetry, the folk-song ; of both,
the ultimate composer is unknown, both glorify an aristocracy
co-existing with a heroic kingship.
In the epic the strange identity of human nature is once more
revealed. Here, after the ages of classic civilization and of
Christian faith, an epoch as simple and hardy, noble and child
like as the Greek heroic age, is reborn, under changed stars
indeed, and on ground strewn with the ruins of empires, and
amid confusion of broken lights. This recurrence of the past is
the beauty of the poem, “all of iron” as it is, as the King
Didier said of the hosts of Charles. Here once more is the
Homeric king, “ here are the Franks of France,” like the sons
of the Achaeans, here are quarrels like those in the leaguer of
Troy, and the wrath of Ganelon sends many souls of heroes to
be among “ the holy flowers of Paradise.” God is the spectator
of this fight, and angels and devils take sides with Franks and
Saracens, for the war had a sacred character reflected on it from
the religious indignation that caused the first crusade. Yet,
sacred as is the war, the military character is the more promi
nent, the song is the voice of the free life of the Franks, who
have changed Odin for Christ, without any of the fear or ecstasy
of the monk, but simply as men recognising a higher form of the
God of battles. The courtesy of the North is here with all its
gravity, not even Ganelon returns a railing answer; but this
courtesy is the natural growth of reverence from freeman to
freeman, and has none of the later refinement of chivalry.
�40
The Chanson de Roland.
Love, too, so soon to be the god of Western poetry, is kept out
of view—a power unthought of in time of war—and though the
lady Aide dies at the news of Roland’s death, he wears in battle
no favours of hers, or of any lady’s.
The artistic form of the epic is a series of laisses, or stanzas
of varying length ; of lines of five feet, each laisse having but
one rhyme or assonance throughout. M. Littrd has translated
a book of Homer into this metre, not without success ; and an
idea of its value for Homeric imitation may be gathered from
this fragment by M. L. Gautier:—
“ Oiez chanson plus bele n’iert chantee
Ce est d’Achille a la chiere membree
Qui tant duel fist en Grece la loee
Par qui tant atnne en enter fust logee
Tant corps es chiens gite comme cuiree.”
The poet starts at once in medias res, there is no invocation
of any muse. Charles is sitting on his golden throne, judging
his host, under a pine-tree; around the warriors are playing
chess or draughts, like the suitors on the threshold of Odysseus.
Then comes Blancandrin to the Emperor of “ the long beard
in white flower,” with offers of peace and treaty from Marsile,
sultan of the miscreants. Marsile will give hostages, and follow
the Emperor to Aachen. Here Roland speaks out, and would
have Charles refuse all parley with heathens who once already
had slain his envoys. This is enough to make Ganelon,
Roland’s stepfather, reply moult jierement on the other side.
From this quarrel, the /bthvig of Ganelon takes occasion. As the
barons wrangle Charles speaks, the Emperor is still lord of his
warring knights, Franceis si taisent at his word. He decides
to send an envoy to Marsile, and the choice falls on the re
luctant Ganelon, who now thinks himself but a slain man. As
he mounts to ride away with Blancandrin, he already meditates
treason. , “ Seigneurs,” he says, “ ye shall have news of this
sending.’ Yet his heart is softened a moment, thinking of la
belle France, and of his son at home.
“ Baldewin mon filz que vous savez
E lui aidez, e pur seignior le tenez.”
There is even something noble and admirable in Ganelon's
bearing. He scarcely disguises his intention to play the traitor,
a part fatal in his house, as other crimes in the house of Thyestes.
“ In hell we are a great house,” says a traitor of his line, in a
later epic, and in the hostile camp Ganelon acts like one who is
treacherous through no coward fear. He cries aloud to Marsile,
“ Be thou baptized, oh king, to Aachen shalt thou be haled,
�The Chanson de Roland.
41
and there receive judgment, and there shalt thou die in shame
and mean estate?’ Marsile laid his hand on his spear, it seemed
as if the envoy were to be slain with his missive unread. Then
Ganelon having been as insulting as his code required, produced
Charles’s letter, and as Marsile read it, set his back against a pine,
and half drew his sword. Even the ranks of miscreants could
scarce forbear to cheer : Noble Barun ad ci, they said. He is
indeed a fair knight, broken loose from the central duty, the
necessary loyalty of feudalism.
Marsile found the letter less fiery than the manner of its
delivery; he spoke softly to Ganelon, and offered him a present
of sable skins, a Homeric rather than a chivalrous form of satisfac
tion. “ When will Charles the Old be weary of war ?” “Never
while his nephew Roland and the Peers are on ground,” says
Ganelon ; and he advises the Sultan to send tribute and hostages,
but withal to lay a great ambush in the passes of the Pyrenees.
Then Ganelon swears to treason on the relics of his sword, and
returns to camp “en l’albe, si cum li jurz esclairet,” bringing the
keys of Saragossa, hostages and treasures.
Before the army sets out for home, Charles has an evil dream,
that Ganelon seized his spear in the pass of the hills. The king
■wakes, and weeps like Agamemnon or Achilles, the ready heroic
tears. “ Charles ne poet muer que de ses oilz ne plurt.” By
Ganelon’s advice he assigns the rearguard to Roland, with Evrard
de Rousillon, Turpin, and Oliver. Then the army broke up
camp. “ Black rocks they crossed, and dark valleys,” till they
came within sight of Gascony. Then again broke out the ready
heroic tears, “ at memory of their fiefs and fields and of their
little ones, and gentle wives none was there who did not weep.”
There was forethought of evil in the hearts of the vanguard ; in
the rear, Oliver heard the footsteps of the gathering Pagans.
“We shall have battle,” he says. “ God grant it,” says Roland,
“ que malvais chant de nus chantet ne seit.” Never let bad
ballad be sang of us. Then Oliver would have spoken evil of
Ganelon, but Roland would not hear it; “ mis parastre ist, ne
voeill que mot en suns.” Nor will Roland listen to Oliver when
he bids him blow his magic horn, for aid against miscreants.
“ In sweet France I would lose my fame.”
The heathen approach, Turpin absolves the army; no ele
ments of sacrament are there but grass and leaves. So in
Threnakia the doomed company of Odysseus made hapless sacri
fice, QvXXa ^peipafitvoi rtptva 8pvoc vxpiKopoto. Then the Franks
cried “ Mount Joieand Aelroth, the nephew of Marsile, rode
along the heathen line shouting taunts, and the melde began.
Through all the scene of battle, the Frankish singer, like Scott
�42
The Chanson de Roland.
in the song of Flodden, “ never stoops his wing?’ In this Homeric
battle Roland drives his lance through breastplate and breast
of Aelroth, Oliver casts down Fausseron, “ Seigneur of the land
of Dathan and Abiron,” Turpin slays King Corsablyx. Spears
and axes sound like hammers on heroic mails; the fight goes
well for the Franks. “ Gente est nostre battaille,” cries Oliver.
Siglorel falls, the “ enchanter whom Jupiter had led through
bell.” Sathan hath his soul. Lances are broken and thrown
away. Oliver draws his sword Haute claire—it is no battle to
smite in with a spear truncheon. Roland draws Durandal; the
peers cut their way through the Saracens, as Cortez’s men
through the white clouds of Aztec spearmen. But the innume
rable hosts of the miscreants close in, the heathen reserves come
up, the ranks of the barons are thinned. And now would
Roland fain sound his horn, but Oliver mocks him. “ Wilt thou
not lose thy fame in sweet France? Ah, never now shalt thou
lie in the arms of Aide my sister.” “Nay, sound,” said Turpin,
“ we shall have burial at our friends’ hands, and be no wolves’
spoil.” Then the hero blew till blood started from his mouth,
and the echo of that dread horn wound through the passes
of the hills, and rang above the tempest of wind, and the
thunder, the wailing of nature, la granz dulurs pur la mort
de Roland. Surely if there is anything of mythology in the
legend of Roland it is here, where the heaven is darkened,
and the veil of the heaven is rent, and the blind powers of the
world cry, as for Baldur or Adonis. Charles heard the horn,
and knew his nephew was in extremity, and knew the treason
of Ganelon. So Ganelon was given to the cooks and campfollowers, to bind him and torment him. Meanwhile the battle
raged on the Spanish side of the hills, “ the black folk that had
nothing white save the teeth,” fell on the weary knights. Never
shall they see tere de France, mult dulz pais. The Califf
wounds Oliver to death, and is slain by the Paladin, whose eyes
are now dimmed by blood and heat, and who strikes blindly,
like John of Bohemia at Cre^y. A blow even falls on Roland’s
crest, “Sire cumpain faites le vos de gred,” he asks, “ did you
strike me wilfully?” “Nay, for I hear thee, but see thee not,
friend Roland, God help thee.” Then Roland pardoned him
before God, “ d icel mot Vun a Valtre ad clinet.” With this
courtesy they parted that had in life been true companions in
arms, and in death were not long divided. Now Roland’s horse
was slain, and himself foredone with battle, and he gathered the
corpses of the peers in a circle about the dying Bishop Turpin.
The bishop crosses his hands, “ ses beles mams les blanches,”
his fair white hands, that shine out in the rough poem like a
delicate jleur de Paradis from hewn Gothic work. They shall
�The Chansen de Roland.
43
all meet soon, he says, among the Holy Innocents. So Roland
spoke his praise over Oliver, as Borsover the dead Sir Launcelot.
But Oliver is honoured, not as “ the curtiest knight that ever in
hall did eat with ladies/’ but
“ Pur Osbercs rompre et desmailler,
Epur proz domes tenir e cunseiller ....
En multe tere n’ot meillur chevaler.”
Last, Roland lays himself down “ sur l’erbe verte,” and seeks to
break the blade of Durandal lest it fall into the hands of un
believers. Ten blows on the hard rock and on the Sardonyx
stone fail to splinter the steel. “ Ah, Durandal, how clear thou
art and bright that shinest as the sun ; with thee have I con
quered lands and domains for Charles of the white beard.
Yea, now for thee have I sorrow and heaviness, and would die
sooner than see thee in pagan hands. Holy thou art, and lovely;
in thy golden hilt is store of relics. How many kingdoms have
I taken with thee, wherein Charles now rules !” Then he lay
down on the green grass beneath a pine, and cast his sword and
horn beneath his body. His face was turned to Spain, and
many things came into his mind—sweet France, and the Barons
of his house, and Charles his lord. He might not endure, but
wept and groaned heavily. He stretched out to God the glove
of his right hand ; S. Gabriel took it from his grasp. Roland is
dead ; God have his soul in heaven. S. Michael of the Sea
bare his spirit to Paradise.
The poem might well end with Roland’s, as the Iliad with
Hector’s, death. But national pride requires that the Paynim
should not triumph, and poetical justice demands the punish
ment of Ganelon. The sun stood still for Charles, as of old on
Gilboah, and the heathen, calling on Termagaunt their god,
were driven to Saragossa. They pass like a mist into the dark ;
the tired horses lie down and feed as they lie. Charles finds
Roland’s body with its face to the foe. In Saragossa, Marsile
beats his image of Apollo, and casts the idol of Mahomet into
a ditch. Clearly the poet’s notion of the Arab monotheism was
gathered previous to the Crusades, from some alien fetichism,
and from memoirs of the degraded rulers of Olympus.
Next day was a day of battle. The king fought well in his
place, dient Franceis, Icist Reis ist Vassals, Mult bien i fieri
Charles li Reis, an angel stood by him. Night fell softly.
Clere est la lune, et les esteiles flambiert, when Charles marched
into Saragossa. His second return was unmolested ; but in
Aachen the beloved of Roland waited for news of her lord.
Aide “of the golden hair and the bright face,” fell dead at
Charles’s feet. He would have given her rough comfort, and his
�An Early French Economist.
44
son for husband. Here only love enters the poem, “vierge
comme la Mort.” The part of woman in the Western world is
not yet come.
With Aide’s death all the interest of the Chanson ceases. Yet
the last lines are dramatic. The grey king is musing alone ; he
says, Deus, si peneuse est ma vie, a vista opens of future
wars without Roland’s sword, of a hard end to a hard life, of
Norman invaders and a tarnished fame, to the eyes of the weary
emperor.
Ci fait le Geste que Turoldus declinet. So ends the epic
which Theroualde, whoever he was, wrote, or composed, or
recited. New themes, chivalry, Arthur’s Table, faerie, came in,
“ the newest songs are sweetest to men.” When Ronsard and
Voltaire sought subjects for epics they found them in a fictitious
Francus, and that dubious hero, Henri IV. The later writer
might well say that the French have not la tele e pique. What
ever the conquering Franks possessed of weighty language, of
simple heroism and grave imagination, they lost as they became
one with the subject Celts and Latins.
The Chanson de Roland will probably always be for France,
not a source of new and lofty poetry, but a rough literary curi
osity, a thing to admire by practice and with reservations. The
nation, like Sainte-Beuve, is more at home with the polished arti
fice of the Renaissance, or the passion of the Romantic school.
Art.
III.—An Early French Economist.
IERRE LE PESANT DE BOISGUILBERT, or Boisguillebert, was the Civil and Criminal Lieutenant of the Balliage of
Rouen towards the end of the seventeenth century, a rank about
equivalent to that of President of the Civil Tribunal at the pre
sent day.
Beyond the fact that he was a grand-nephew of the great
Corneille, and that he was a native of Normandy, presumably of
a poor gentleman’s family of Rouen, scarcely anything is known
of his birth and parentage.
The Due de St. Simon, in his well-known Memoirs, tells us
that Boisguilbert, inspired with the profoundest sympathy for the
woes of his country, and deeply disgusted with the incapacity and
dishonesty of the officials who preyed upon her, resolved to wait
upon Pontchartrain, the Controller General of Finance, in the
hope of inducing him to listen to his plans of reform.
P
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
The Chanson de Roland
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [London]
Collation: p. 32-44 ; 22 cm.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references. From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. From Westminster Review 44 (July 1973). Review of Les Chansons de Roland, texte critique accompagne d'une traduction nouvelle et precede d'une introduction historique par Leon Gautier. Tours 1872.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
[s.n.]
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
[n.d.]
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
CT40
Subject
The topic of the resource
Book reviews
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
[Unknown]
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (The Chanson de Roland), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Language
A language of the resource
English
French
Book Reviews
Conway Tracts
Legends
Poetry
Song of Roland
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/188bb0cc0e740da559b4989528399104.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=rdyH3VuZ6Vp3J9jiSY16ViOC2Bdsw5G3gy3z4SE9TlpIz-x8Isc8j71vXexe%7Ew9irLlxAoDp8VviVq%7ExBwvpSpiyFjvFgoh5%7Ex0Hvkf5IwkYFgKdXcA%7EFzH9cHNSUzI9xUB-VSvzMi6aXMXgKKmozivSvzXH1Ou5sW4PQOPBRj7xFM9WKCPw5wjlzKNcDfNoEvdo2fGf57Nfoz8rs0lSe6%7E%7EKl5xBhdsAlv8rsH8hsAp0dKM2%7ETSnWP3XkEYhlXpAlp%7EVPodEziiCV-fTD1hbFZxer%7EjmcmjR6hHREbv3AbXsPrHSTRBPlBMFhADJMFjnR9Xmy4rMZExeNKPrY6T0A__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
50c62fa2fbc0dd1d276b094bdd90359b
PDF Text
Text
THE
BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH,
AND ITS SURVIVAL IN
FOLK-LORE, LEGEND, AND DOGMA.
DELIVERED BEFORE THE
SUNDAY LECTURE SOCIETY,
ON
SUNDAY AFTERNOON,
FEBRUARY, 1875.
BY
EDWARD CLODD, F.R.A.S.
PUBLISHED BY THOMAS SCOTT,
NO. 11 THE TERRACE, FARQUHAR ROAD, UPPER NORWOOD,
LONDON, S.E.
1875.
Price Threepence.
�LONDON:
PRINTED BY- C. W. REYNELL, 16 LITTLE BULTENEY STREET
HAYMARKET, W.
�THE
BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH,
AND ITS
SURVIVAL IN FOLK-LORE, LEGEND, AND
DOGMA.
HE birth-place of myth is in. man’s endeavour to
interpret the meaning of his surroundings. He
has adapted much, but created nothing. The rudest of
his race built the fabric of his fancy out of pre-existing
materials which earth and sky supplied, and for the
greater works of imagination with which the poet and
the painter have enriched ns, they have drawn upon
those materials and upon that experience of nature and
life which has come down from the past as an intel
lectual inheritance. Whether it be the origin of a
universe or the rhythmic setting of a great product of
the human mind, the maxim—ex nihilo nihil fit—holds
good through all space and time.
Man, in his first outlook on Nature, altogether igno
rant of the character of the forces by which he was
environed, ignorant of the unaltering relation between
cause .and effect—a relation which it needed the expe
rience of ages and the generalisations therefrom to
enable him to apprehend—regarded every moving thing
as impelled by a force akin to that which impelled him,
and differing only in degree. The only force of which
he. was conscious was what we call the force of wifi.
His own voluntary movements were governed by his
will; and so he argued that everything else. which
moved did so because it' was ’Endowed with will-force
and directed -by it. A personal life and will was there
fore attributed to sun, moon, clouds, river, waterfall,
ocean, and tree, and the varying phenomena of the sky
at dawn or noonday, at grey eve or black-clouded yight,
was the product of the controlling life that dwelt in a .
JL
�4
The Birth and Growth of Myth, and its
In a thousand different forms this conception was
expressed. The clouds were cows with swelling udders
to be milked by the winds of heaven; the thunder was
the roar of a mighty beast; the lightning a serpent
darting at its prey, an angry eye flashing, the storm
demon’s outshot forked tongue ; the rainbow a thirsty
monster; the waterspout a long-tailed dragon. This
was not imagery, but an explanation. Primitive man
did not embody his concepts in pretty conceits, but
meant exactly what he said. ‘ A thing is said to be
explained when it is classified with other things with
which we are already acquainted. We explain the
origin, progress, and ending of a thunder-storm when we
classify the phenomena presented by it along with other
more familiar phenomena of vaporisation and condensa
tion. But the primitive man explained the same thing
to his own satisfaction when he had classified it along
with the well-known phenomena of human volition,’ by '
constructing a theory of a great black dragon pierced by
the unerring arrows of a heavenly archer, who releases
the treasures of light and rain which the monster had
stolen.
The myth-making stage in human progress finds an
analogy ready to hand in the child’s nature. To him not
only are all living creatures endowed with human intel
ligence, but everything is alive. He beats the chair
against which he has knocked his head, and afterwards
kisses it in token of renewed friendship • in his Kosmos
wooden soldiers and wooden horses are actuated by the
same sort of personal will as nursemaids and kittens.
Even among full-grown civilised Europeans, as Mr.
Grote remarks, “ The force of momentary passion will
often suffice to supersede the acquired habit, and even
an intelligent man may be impelled in a moment of
agonising pain to kick or beat the lifeless object from
which he has suffered.” Mr. Tylor tells us that “the
wild native of Brazil would bite the stone he stumbled
over, or the arrow that wounded him. Such a mental
condition may be traced along the course of history, not
merely in impulsive habit, but in formally enacted law.
�Survival in Folk-Lore3 Legend, and Dogma. ■ $
The rude Kukis of Southern Asia were very scrupulous
in carrying out their simple law of vengeance, life for
life; if a tiger killed a Kuki, his family were in disgrace
till they had retaliated by killing and eating this tiger
or another; but, further, if a man was killed by a fall
from a tree, his relations would take their revenge by
cutting the tree down, and scattering it in chips. A
modern king of Cochin-China, when one of his ships
sailed badly, used to put it in the pillory as he would
any other criminal.” Mr. Grote adds “ that a court of
justice was held at the Prytaneum, in Athens, to try
any inanimate object, such as an axe or a piece ot
wood or stone, which had caused the death of any one
without proved human agency, and this wood or stone,
if condemned, was in solemn form cast beyond the
border. The spirit of this remarkable procedure re
appears in the old English law (repealed in the present
reign), whereby not only a beast that kills a man, but a
cart-wheel that runs over him, or a tree that falls on him
and kills him, is deodand, or given to God, i.e., forfeited
and sold for the poor.” ('Primitive Culture,’ I., 259).
Among ancient legal proceedings in France we read of
animals condemned to the gallows for the crime of
murder, and of swarms of caterpillars which infested
certain districts being admonished to take themselves
off within a given number of days on pain of being
declared accursed and excommunicated 1
The wide-spread attribution of life and consequent
personification of all things, which has just received
illustration, is further seen in the attribution of sexual
qualities which survives, frequently in most perplexing
form, in gender. In some simple and early languages
there are but two genders, masculine and feminine, the
classification of certain things as neutrius generis “of
neither gender,” being of later origin. An inquiry into
the origin of myths throws light upon the practice of
attributing sex to lifeless objects, the personification of
anything being followed by division into gender accord*
ing to certain distinctive qualities, the major and inde
pendent being classed as male, the minor and dependent
�6
The Birth and Growth of Myth, and its
as female. Our language has happily got rid of the
false distinctions which encumber some ancient and
modern languages, and for the most part attributes sex
only to living beings, while in' German, for example, a
spoon is masculine, a fork is feminine, and a knife is
neuter, the mention of which, by way of illustration, in
dicates what an interesting field of inquiry into the par
ticular causes which have determined the attribution of
masculine gender to certain lifeless objects and of femi
nine gender to others, lies open to the student of the
subject.
Were further illustration needed of the material source
from whence all expression has come, we find it in our
abstract terms, every one of which had originally a con
crete meaning, “ its present use being the result of a
figurative transfer founded on the recognition of an
analogy between a physical and a mental act or product.
For example, ‘ abstract ’ is ‘ drawn off, dragged away
‘ concrete ’ is ‘ grown together,’ comported into something
‘ substantial,’ as we say, that is, something that ‘ stands
beneath.’ ‘ Apprehend ’ signifies literally ‘ to lay hold
of,’ and we still use it in that sense, as when we say that
the officer ‘ apprehends ’ the felon ; to ‘ possess ’ is ‘ to
sit by, to beset.’ When we employ the phrase, ‘ I pro
pose to discuss an important subject,’ we use words
signifying originally something apprehensible by thesenses. To ‘ propose ’ is ‘ to set in front ’ of us; to
‘discuss’ is ‘to shake to pieces ;’ a ‘ subject’ is a thing
‘ thrown under,’ something brought under our notice ;
‘ important ’ means ‘ carrying within ’—that is, having a
content, not empty or valueless.”—(See Prof. Whitney’s
‘ Lectures,’ p. 112.)
Happily abundant evidence is at hand to establish the
main position advanced as to the origines of myth.
There are savage tribes still in the myth-making stage
of human development, whose present condition repre
sents that out of which the higher races have emerged,
and the relation of whose mythology to that of those
races it is needful to determine.
As a proof of the personification of the phenomena of
�Survival in Folk-Lore, Legend, and Dogma. 7
nature, let us take the dark patches on the face of the
moon.
In the Samoan Islands these are said to be a woman,
a child, and a mallet. A woman was once hammering*
out paper-cloth, and seeing the moon rise, looking like
a great bread-fruit, she asked it to come down, and let
her child eat a piece of it. Hut the moon was very
angry at the idea of being eaten, and gobbled up woman,,
child, and mallet; and there they are to this day. In
Ceylon, it is said that when Buddha was wandering
hungry in the forest a pious hare offered itself to him to
be killed and eaten, whereupon that holy man set it on
high in the moon that all men might see it, and marvel
at its self-sacrifice and piety. The Selish Indians of
North-Western America say that the little wolf was in
love with the toad, and pursued her one moonlight night
till, as a last chance, she made a desperate spring on to
the face of the moon, and there she is still.
Comparing these with familiar myths upon the same
object, we have our own “ Man in the Moon,” who was
put up there for picking sticks on a Sunday; the Ger
man version, which places him there, with a woman,
for the crime of churning butter on Sunday; the Ice
landic myth, in which the two children familiar to us,
as Jack and Jill, have been kidnapped by the moon, and
carried up to her, where they stand to this day with the
bucket on the pole across their shoulders, falling away,
one after the other, as the moon wanes—a phase em
balmed in the couplet—
“ Jack fell down and broke his crown,
And Jill came tumbling after. ”
Take again the stars, to which personal life and action
is attributed in savage mythology. The natives of Aus
tralia say the stars in Orion’s belt and scabbard are
young men dancing a corroboree; the Esquimaux speak
of the stars in Orion’s belt as seal-hunters who missed
their way home ; the Kasirs of Bengal declare that the
stars were once men—they climbed to the top of a tree
(of course, the great heaven-tree of so many myths, of
the Jack and Beanstalk genus), but others below cut
�8
B'he Birth and Growth of Myth, and its
the trunk and left them up there in the branches.
According to the ancient Aryan, they are the offspring
of the first man, Tama, giving light from heaven to
men below; and hence the superstitious peasant of our
own land, for a reason he cannot tell, will teach his
children that it is wicked to point at the stars. The
names given to our constellations, and the grave belief
of men like Origen and Kepler that the stars are
animated, show what kindred explanations races in very
different states of development give of similar pheno
mena. Along the line, too, wherever earthquakes are
felt, there are myths of an animal underneath the earth.
The Hindu notion of a great tortoise beneath the earth,
which is thus kept from falling, at once occurs to us.
That myth is developed there in many forms, but we are
now more concerned with its form among barbarous
races. In Celebes we hear of the world-supporting hog,
who rubs himself against a tree, and thereby shakes the
earth. The Caribs say that when there is an earth
quake Mother Earth is dancing; the Thascalons that
the tired world-supporting gods cause it by shifting
their burden to a new relay ; the Kamchadals tell of the
earthquake-god who sledges below ground, and whose
dog causes the earthquake when he shakes off fleas or
snow; the Japanese think that earthquakes are caused
by the huge whales creeping underground, having been
probably led to this idea by finding the fossil bones,
which seem to them the remains of subterranean
monsters. Erom all this a short step leads us to the
popular belief which, in ancient times, connected the
eruptions of 2Etna and Stromboli with the infernal
regions, and credited the fiends below with the accom
panying noises. I must not dwell any longer upon
these nature-myths, which it is obvious are capable of
very expanded comparison; but perhaps enough has.
been said to show that the mythology of the lower races
gives us a basis for studying nature-myths in their
historical development among higher races, and affords
very strong evidence in favour of the thesis advanced
at starting—namely, that the birth-place of.myth is in
�Survival in Folk-Lore, Legend, and Dogma.
9
man’s endeavour to interpret the meaning of his sur
roundings.
The larger number of investigators in the field of what
is known as comparative mythology are of this opinion;
but it is to be borne in mind that there are limits
thereto, and it is to be regretted that some of our com
parative mythologists have committed themselves to a
theory which refers all the myths, both in outline and
detail, of one great section of the human family, to the
sun and dawn, basing such theory on the results of a
comparison between classic and Vedic myths, to which
I shall have occasion presently to refer.
Upon this theory not only are all Aryan myths in the
last resort to be adequately explained by reference to the
phenomena just named, but the great epic poems which
sprang into existence in the ages which followed the
dispersion of the tribes, and which exhibit an identical
framework, are explained in like manner. Without at
all abating what has been said in support of the nature
origin of myth, one may adhere to the general principle
while rejecting its universal application, and it does
seem hard to admit that the Trojan war is but the story
of the contest waged in the East to recover the treasures
of which the powers of darkness have robbed the day
in the West; that Helen is the dawn, and Achilles a
solar figment; that the heroes of the Volsungs and
King Arthur and his Table Knights are but sunbeams
and shadows ; and that many of them have not “ clus
tered round some historic basis.” Upon this solar theory
of myths Mr. Tylor appositely remarks :—“ The close
and deep analogies between the life of nature and the
life of man have been for ages dwelt upon by poets and
philosophers, who in simile or in argument have told of
light and darkness, of calm and tempest, of birth,
growth, change, decay, dissolution, renewal. But no
one-sided interpretation can be permitted to absorb into
a single theory such endless many-sided correspondences
as these. Rash inferences which, on the strength of
mere resemblance, derive episodes of myth from episodes
of nature, .must be regarded with utter mistrust, for the
�io
'The Birth and Growth of My th, and its
student who has no more stringent criterion than this
for his myths of sun and sky and dawn, will find them
wherever it pleases him to seek them. Should he, for
instance, demand as his property the nursery ‘ Song of
Sixpence,’ his claim would be easily established:
obviously the four-and-twenty blackbirds are the fourand-twenty hours, and the pie that holds them is the
underlying earth covered with the overarching sky;
how.true a touch of nature it is that when the pie is
opened, -i.e., when day breaks, the birds begin to sing,
the King is the Sun, and his counting out his money is
pouring out the sunshine ; the Queen is the Moon, and
her transparent honey the moonlight; the Maid is the
rosy-fingered Dawn who rises before the Sun, her master,
and hangs out the clouds—his clothes—across the sky;
the particular blackbird who so tragically ends the
tale by snipping off her nose, is the hour of sunrise.”
I will now pass from this good-humoured banter
against the extreme application of a sound principle, to
the evidence of a common mythology among the IndoEuropean peoples before their separation. Most of those
present are doubtless aware that the languages spoken
in Europe by the Celts, Teutons, Slaves, Greeks and
Romans ; and in Asia, by the Hindus, Persians, and
some lesser peoples; are all proved to be descendants
of a single mother-tongue, known as the Aryan, or, as
better defining the races included thereunder, the IndoEuropean. From this fact, the inference that these
peoples are blood-relations is beyond all question,
although physical causes, such as climate, food, and
intermixture with inferior races, have in the long course
of time brought about certain marked divergences.
Language, the instrument which has been applied
with such signal success in revealing this common ori
gin of the Aryan nations, has also brought to light
the fact that before the several tribes dispersed in slow
succession, some westwards towards Europe, and the
rest, at later intervals, southwards through the passes
of the Hindu-Kush mountains into Hindustan, they had
a common religion, the observance of whose rites had
�Survival in Folk-Lore, Legend, and Dogma. 11
not become the usurped functions of a priestly caste, and
a common mythology, closely linked to that religion,
which survives among European nations in departing
beliefs and in legends which have been promoted into
history, or mingled with it; in nursery tales, proverbs,
superstitions, and all their kith and kin, so that the
Hindu mother amuses her child with fairy tales which
often correspond, even in minor incidents, with stories
in Scottish or Scandinavian nurseries; and she tells
them in words which are phonetically akin to words in
Swedish and Gaelic.
The key which unlocked these interesting facts is the
Sanskrit language, for, as in the history of the IndoEuropean languages, it served as the starting-point,
because, although related to them not as ancestor, but as
elder member of the same family, it has, more than any
other member, preserved traces of the common parent
from which they sprang, so in the history of IndoEuropean mythology it is in the ancient Vedic texts
written in Sanskrit, and especially the Rig-Veda, that
we find the materials for a comparative study, since
therein are preserved the first, fresh meaning of Aryan
myth. The investigation itself was prompted by the
absence of any satisfactory canon of interpretation of
the Greek myths. They had been degraded into dull
chronicle by the method of Euhemeros, which made
Herakles a vulgar thief, carrying off a crop of oranges
guarded by mastiffs, and Jove smiting the giants a king
repressing sedition; they had been credited by Lord
Bacon with an allegorical meaning which was precisely
what the fancy of the expositor chose to make it, but
which was at least an advance upon the coarse and
revolting stories of which the Greeks regarded them as
the vehicle. It did not seem likely that a people who
have made the world more beautiful for all of us, whose
works of art are alike the delight and unrealised ideal of
our sculptors, and from whose wise ones the wise of our
day gladly learn, had deliberately cultivated a mass of
repulsive myths, degrading to their framers and accep
tors ; and no small credit is due to those comparative
�12
The Birth and Growth of Myth, and its
mythologists who have recovered that hidden and purer
meaning enshrined in classic myth, and which throws
light upon the intellectual condition under which it was
born.
This work was accomplished by comparing a large
number of the Greek names of gods and heroes, whose
meaning is obscure, with names allied to those in San
skrit whose meaning is clear, the relationship between
the two, hidden as it is by the substitution of one sound
for another, which extends to all the Indo-European
languages, being explained by the law which governs such
changes, or “ permutations of consonants,” and known
as “ Grimm’s law.” In many cases the Sanskrit words
were found to be common names for the sun, the sky,
the dawn, and so on, the words in each case having plain
physical meanings. As an illustration of the method
and its successful application, let us take the familiar
myth explaining the birth of Athene. She is said to be
the daughter of Zeus, and to have sprung from his brain
or forehead. Now the Greek Zeus, like the Latin Deus,
is the Sanskrit Dyaus, which means the bright sky, or
Heaven—Dyaus-pitar being the same as Zeupater, and
Lat. Jupiter. Athene is probably the Sanskrit Ahand,
which is one of the many Vedic names for the dawn.
Thus the meaning of the Greek myth is obvious. The
dawn springs from the forehead of the sky : the day
break appears rising from the East. But to the Greek,
in whose language this physical meaning was lost, Zeus
did not mean the bright sky, but the greatest of the
Olympian deities, father of gods and men. Such a result
might be naturally expected when the Aryan communi
ties became more widely severed, the personal elements
in each myth undergoing great changes accounted for by
geographical reasons, changes which caused the divine
of one mythology to be the demoniacal’ of another,
which gave to the myths of the North their rugged
grandeur, and to the myths of the South their stately
grace.
The theory that the similarity between Aryan myths
is caused by one nation having borrowed or adopted
�Survival in Folk-Lore, Legend, and Dogma.
13
those of another is not tenable, unless there was an inter
course between them after their separation far more
active than history warrants ; and we shall presently see
that the argument between the stories of India and
Scandinavia makes it incredible that there has been any
borrowing, and, still less, any independent fabrication,
while there is just that unlikeness in certain detail which
might be expected from the different geographical posi
tions of the two nations, explaining how impossible it
was that the elephant, the giant ape and gigantic turtle,
which occur so frequently in the Brahmanic mythology,
should find a place in the mythical legends of Northern
Europe.
There is one class of myth which affords interesting
evidence of descent from a common source, and of
survival in an unlooked-for form.
All the Aryan nations, and some other nations which
have had intercourse with them, have, among their
legends, the story of a battle between a hero and a
monster, in each case the hero becoming victor, and
releasing treasures, or in some way rendering help to
man. In Hindu myth this battle is fought between
Indra and the dragon Vritra; in Persian between
Rustem and a huge wild ass ; in Roman between Hercules
and the three-headed monster Cacus; in Greek, among
other like tales, between Apollo and the snake Python ;
in Norse between Thor and Midgard and between
Sigurd and Pafnir; in Jewish between Satan and God;,
in Christian between St. George and the Dragon.
To explain these, it is needful to turn for a moment to
the civilization of the Aryan tribes. The efforts of that
people were mainly directed to increasing the numbers
of their herds and flocks. (The identification of these
with wealth is familiar to us in the word “pecuniary,
which is derived from Latin “ pecus,” cattle). The cow
yielded milk for the Aryan and his household ; her dung
fertilised the soil; her young multiplied the wealth of
the family at an ever-increasing rate, and she naturally
became the symbol of fruitfulness and prosperity, and
ultimately an object of veneration; while for the functions
�14
The Birth and Growth of Myth, and its
which the bull performed he was the type of strength.
The Aryan’s enemy was he who stole or injured the
cattle ; the Aryan’s friend was he who saved them from
the robber’s clutch.
That personification of phenomena to which reference
has been made already being brought into play, the great
heaven was to the Aryan a vast plain over which roamed
animals of as varied a kind as the ever-shifting clouds
indicated, the two most prominent animal figures in the
mythical heaven being the cow and bull. The sun, giver
of light, most welcome blessing, was the bull of majesty
and strength; the white clouds were cows from whose
full udders dropped the milk of heaven for the support
of the children of earth, the blessed rain.
But there were dark clouds also, and these were the
dwelling-place of the monster who conceals the herds of
cattle, and withholds from earth both light and rain.
Chiefest among the exploits of Indra in his battle
with Vritra, the thief, serpent, wolf, wild boar (as he is
variously called in the Rig-Veda), and his crushing
defeat of that enemy, through which he releases the im
prisoned cows ; the hidden treasures bursting forth from
the sky as the monster dies, killed by the darts of
Indra.
This myth, of course, depicts that battle between light
and darkness which is probably the most striking phe
nomenon in nature, and, in addition to its existence in
this form, it is the main source of the endless tales of
lovely ladies in durance vile, from which the chivalry
and bravery of knights releases them ; as is the wintry
sleep of nature the parent of myths of spell-bound
maidens and of heroes in repose.
Passing by any analysis of the myths of light and
darkness among the Western Aryans, since they would
yield the same results as that furnished by the Vedic
myth, we have to note what a marvellous change has
converted this myth of Indra and Vritra into a religion
and a philosophy. Amid the conflicting powers of
nature and the analogy presented to them by the cease-
�Survival in Folk-Lore, Legend, and Dogma.
15
less warfare between good and evil, there was deve
loped in the Persian religion that dualism which has so
mightily influenced for evil the beliefs which flourish
among us to-day. The demon Vritra becomes the arch
fiend Ahriman, who struggles with Ormuzd, not like
Indra, for the rescue of cattle, but for the citadel of
Mansoul, the dominion over the universe. Ahriman
mars the earth which Ormuzd has made. He quenches
its light, keeps back the rain from its thirsty soil, and is
the author of evil thought, evil words, and evil deeds.
Like his physical ancestor, Vritra, he is represented as
a serpent, and his name is the “ Spirit of Darkness.”
It was with this dualism that the Jews came into asso
ciation during their memorable exile in Babylon. There
is no evidence that previous to their captivity they
possessed the conception of a Devil as the author of all
evil. In the earlier books of their Old Testament
Jehovah is represented as dispensing with his own
hand good and evil, and the notion of an arch-demon
occurs only in those books composed after the close con
tact of the Semitic Jew with the Aryan Persian. The
Jewish mind was ripe to receive this belief, because it
was already familiar with the notion of a being who
was a minister of God, and whose office it seems to have
been to act as a sort of detective or public accuser, as
well as seducer. This would cause him to be regarded
as an object of dread, and at last to be credited with the
authorship of evil, and hence the Persian Ahriman found
a place in Jewish theology as the being familiar to us as
the Devil; and his hierarchy of spirits as the swarm of
demons upon whom every evil was charged. With
goat-like body, horns and cloven hoofs borrowed from
the sylvan god Pan ; with red beard and pitchfork bor
rowed from the Norse god Thor ; with person black and
sooty as befitted his abode, we might smile at this Devil
decked in the dress of different climes and ages, if the
conception of him as stupid, gullible, and lame, which
obtained in the Middle Ages was the only conception.
But the legends of his pristine purity, of his failure to
grasp supreme power, of his expulsion from heaven with
�16
The Birth and Growth of Myth, and its
liberty to thenceforth torment mankind ; the ascription
of all physical and moral evil to him and his agents ;
the gross materialism which incarnated millions of
demons, and credited them with sway over the elements
of nature and the bodies -and souls of men, giving rise
to that belief in witchcraft through which it is com
puted nine millions of so-called witches were burned
during its existence; these repress the smile, for they
have rested as a blighting curse upon the world, and are
not yet bereft of all power to harm. But the world is
waking from this hideous nightmare, which, like the
Trolls of Norse mythology who burst at sunrise, will
altogether disappear uuder the full light of the know
ledge of our time.
In view of the few minutes remaining at disposal, I
must now proceed by way of illustration, which, in this
matter, is argument and evidence as well, to show that
certain stories long accepted as veritable history have
their source in legends common to many peoples. .
Every one is familiar with the story of William Tell;
how, in the year 1307, Gessler sat a hat on a pole as the
symbol of Imperial power, and ordered every one who
passed by to do obeisance towards it, and how a moun
taineer named Tell, who hated Gessler and the tyranny
which the symbol expressed, passed by without salutingit.
Reputed to be an expert archer, he was ordered, by way
of punishment, to shoot an apple off the head of his own
son, and obeyed. The apple was placed on the boy’s
head, Tell bent his bow, the arrow sped, and both apple
and arrow fell together to the ground. Gessler noticed
that Tell, before shooting, had stuck a second arrow in
his belt, and asked the reason. “It was for you,” replied
Tell; “ had I shot my child, it would have pierced your
heart.” The silence of contemporary historians concern
ing this tale of skill and bravery caused doubt to be
thrown upon it in the sixteenth century ; but so strong
was popular belief in the event, confirmed as it was by
evidences of a kind quite conclusive to people both before
and since, namely, the lime-tree in the market-place at
Altdorf to which Tell’s boy was bound, and the crossbow
�Survival in Folk-Lore, Legend, and Dogma.
17
itself preserved in Zurich arsenal, that one daring sceptic
is said to have been condemned to be burnt for doubting
the truth of the story, contending that it was of Danish
origin. But the sceptic was right, for the old Danish
historian, Saxo Grammaticus, tells of a certain Palnatoki,
who, for some time among Harold’s body-guard, had
made his bravery odious to many of his comrades by his
continual boasting. Talking one day with them when
in his cups, he bragged that he could hit the smallest
apple placed a long way off a wand at the first shot,
which boast came to the hearing of the King, who com
manded that, instead of a wand, the head of Palnatoki’s
own son should have the apple placed upon it, and that,
failing to hit at the first flight of the arrow, Palnatoki
should lose his head. “ Yet,” says the old chronicler,
“did not his sterling courage, though caught in the
snare of slander, suffer him to lay aside his firmness of
heart; he warned the boy urgently, when he took his
stand, to await the coming of the hurtling arrow with
calm ears and unbent head, lest he might defeat the
practised skill of the bowman.” At the first shot the
apple was pierced, and when Palnatoki was asked by
the King why he had taken more arrows from the quiver,
he made answer, “ That I might avenge on the swerving
of the first, lest, perchance, my innocence might have
been punished, while your violence escaped scot-free.”
Saxo gives this as occuring in the year 950. But the
story appears not only in Denmark, but in England,
Norway, Finland, Russia, Persia, and Dr. Dasent says
that a legend of the wild Samoyedes, who never heard
of Tell, or saw a book in their lives, relate it, chapter
and verse, of one of their marksmen.
And in all these stories we find an unerring archer
who, at some tyrant’s bidding, shoots from the head of
some dear one a small object, and who provides himself
with a second arrow, the purpose of which is to kill the
tyrant if the archer’s son be shot.
Whether Tell be, as Max Muller suggests, the last
reflection of the Sun-god, be he called Indra, or Apollo,
or Ulysses, who, with unerring light-shaft, or arrow of
�18
,1
‘The Birth and Growth of Myth, and its
lightning, hit the apple or any other point, and destroy
their enemies with the same bow, matters not; we must,
I think, ask the writers who wish to point their sentences
with an historic reference, not to speak of Switzerland in
future as “ the land of Tell.”
The same ruthless iconoclasm must sweep away that
image of the faithful brute Gellert, whose sad fate in the
story has dimmed many an eye; how, after killing the
wolf which would have devoured Llewellyn’s child, the
prince came home, and finding the cradle upset and the
dog’s mouth blood-smeared, slew the faithful fellow
before he could see from what a death the dog had saved
his boy. Although to this day the tourist is shown the
dog’s grave at Beth-Gellert, the truth must out that the
story occurs in the folk-lore of nearly every Aryan
people. It exists in Russia and Germany ; it was popu'lar among the mediaeval monks; it occurs in Persia,
India, and among non-Aryan races, as the Egyptians
and Chinese.
In the Egyptian story a Wali once smashed a pot full
of herbs which a cook had prepared. The angry cook
thrashed the offender within an inch of his life, and
when he afterwards came to look at the broken pot, he
found among the herbs a poisonous snake.
In the Panchatantra, a Hindu collection of fables
made many centuries ago, the story takes this form :—
An infirm child is left by its mother while she goes to
fetch water, and she charges the father, who is a Brah
man, to watch over it. But he leaves to collect alms,
1 and soon after a snake crawls towards the child. In the
house was an ichneumon, a creature often cherished as a
family friend, who sprang at the snake and killed it.
When the mother came back, the ichneumon went
gladly to meet her, his jaws and face smeared with
blood. The poor mother, thinking it had killed her
child, threw the water-jug at it and killed it; then
seeing her child safe, and the body of the venomous
snake torn to pieces, she beat her breast and face with
grief, and scolded her husband for leaving the house.
The class of stories of which the foregoing are a type, is
�Survival in Folk-Lore, Legend, and Dogma.
19
not likely to have arisen spontaneously in each land.
Tales of bravery and faithfulness have, happily, every
where a residuum of fact, but it does not usually extend
to likeness in minute detail, and they are not to be con
fused with inferences which, cast into forms of myth and
tradition, are drawn from wide-spread facts suggesting
to the mind of man a common explanation. For example,
the discovery of huge bones may give rise to a belief
in an age of giants; the tradition of a diminutive race,
as of the Lapps, in Europe, to a belief in dwarfs; cer
tain marks on the solid rock to myths of footprints of
the gods; the finding of bones of mammoths at some
depth below the surface to the myth of a huge burrow
ing creature that lives underground; the observation
of marine shells on very high mountains to legends of a
great Deluge; but no such reasoning can apply to the
myths of Tell and Gellert. Of course, further research
will show that many of our popular tales are neither
survivals of legends common to the undivided Aryan
tribes nor indigenous products, but foreign importations
conveyed into Europe by the pilgrims, students, mer
chants, and warriors who travelled from West to East
and East to West in the Middle Ages ; but the applica
tion of the comparative method gives the clue to the
source of each. It is no small gain that the science of
comparative mythology has rescued the folk-lore, popu
lar legends, and nursery tales of many lands from the
neglect which was fast consigning them to oblivion, and
discovered in them a valuable aid to our knowledge of
the past. The collection of stories which are now
accessible, and which have been taken down from the
lips of narrators in the Highlands and the Dekhan, in
Iceland and Ceylon, in South Africa and New Zealand,
in Japan and Serbia, are not only interesting in them
selves as products of the story-tellers’ art, but valuable
in the materials which they furnish for comparison and
classification. They indicate composition out of but few
materials originally : their variations being the result of
admixtures of local colouring, historical fact, popular
belief and superstition, all largely affected by the skill of
�20
The Birth and Growth of Myth, and its
the professional story-teller. Under many disguises the
same fairy prince or princess, the same wicked magician
and clever Boots peeps through, disclosing the near
relationship of Hindu nursery tales to the familiar tales
of our childhood.
As illustration let us take the familiar story of Cin
derella, for the original of which we travel to the East,
finding it in that most venerable sacred book of the
Brahmans, the Rig-Veda.
Cinderella is the aurora, the swift one without feet; as
the first of those who appear every day in the eastern
sky, as the first to know the break of day, the aurora is
naturally represented as one of the swiftest among those
who are the guests of the sun-prince (Mitra) during the
night; and, like her cows, which do not cover them
selves with dust, she, in her onward flight, leaves no
footsteps behind her. The word used (“ apad,” wtfhcmt
feet} may, indeed, mean not only she who has no feet,
but also she who has no slippers, the aurora having, as it
appears, lost them ; for the Prince Mitra, while following
the beautiful young girl, finds a slipper, which shows
her footless, the measure of her foot,—a foot so small that
nootherwoman has a foot like it,—and th us we have herein
the point round which the interest of the well-known
story gathers. It is, as is clear, a myth of the sun
chasing the dawn, and just as Cinderella is brilliant and
beautiful only while in the ball-room, so the dawn is rosy
only when the sun is near. (Cf. ‘ Angelo de Gubernati’s
Zool. Myth.,’ I., 31).
In the charming Hindu fairy tales collected by Miss
Frere, under the title of ‘ Old Deccan Days,’ the story is
told of a Rajah who gave his only daughter a pair of
slippers made of gold and jewels. She always wore
them when walking, and one day, while picking wild
flowers on a mountain-side, one of the slippers fell off
and was lost in the jungle below. Not long after it was
found by a prince when hunting, and taken home by him
to, his mother, who urged him to seek for the woman to
whose foot it belonged, that he might wed her. Then
they sent to every town in the kingdom, but in vain;
�Survival in Folk-Lore, Legend, and Dogma.
21
at last, hearing through travellers of a princess who had
lost a jewelled slipper, the prince set off for the court of
her parents to take the missing treasure, and ask for the
princess as his wife, to which both she and her parents
consented. The rest of the story is beautifully touching,
but I cannot dwell further upon it. The same incidents
of search, discovery, and marriage occur in the German
version, ‘ Aschenputtel,’ the Serbian story of 1 Papalluga,’
and others; while in the Greek it is the slipper of Rhodbpis,
which an eagle steals while she is bathing. Flying
with it to Memphis, the bird drops it into the lap of the
Egyptian king as he sits on his seat of judgment, with,
of course, the same result—search after, discovery, and
marriage of its owner.
The same marked correspondences are exhibited in
the wide-spread tale of Beauty and the Beast. In its
Greek form of Psyche and Love ; its German form, 11 the
Soaring Lark its Norse form, “ East of the Sun and
West of the Moon;” its Gaelic form, the “ Daughter of
the Skiesit is a bear, or lion, or dog, or loathly
monster of some kind, who, being under the spell of a
sorceress, is a splendid man at night, but has to resume
his hideous form by day, and who will vanish from his
bride if the light fall upon him. “ In the Panchatantra
there is the story of a king who asked his pet monkey
to watch over him while he was asleep. A bee settled
on the royal head, the monkey could not drive her away,
so he took his sword, killed the bee, but in killing her
killed the king.” A similar parable is put into the mouth
of Buddha ; while in the fables of Phsedros a bold man
gives himself a severe blow on the face in trying to kill
a gnat. In Dasent’s ‘ Tales from the Norse,’ a man saw
a goody hard at work banging her husband across the
head with a beetle, and over his head she had drawn a
shirt without any slit for the neck. 1 Why, goody,’ he
asked, ‘ will yon beat your husband to death ? ’ ‘ No,’
she said, ‘ I only must have a hole in this shirt for
his neck to come through.’
These illustrations of correspondence could be multi
plied indefinitely, while a mere list of stories common to
�22
The Birth and Growth of My th, and its
the different branches of the Aryan stock, and which
are older than the dispersion of the Aryan race, would
easily transform this lecture into a catalogue occupying
some time in detailing.
With the exception of allusion to the change effected
in Jewish theology by the importation therein of the
Persian Ahriman, no reference has been made to the
myths of the Semitic family. The complicated mythology
of the Aryan races is absent from the Semitic, which
may be explained, in a large degree, by the permanence
of the radical elements in Semitic words. For example,
whereas in the Aryan, the Sans. “ Dyaus ” appears in
Greek, not as “Zeus” “the sky,” but as the “god”
Zeus, in the Semitic no such alteration would occur. It
had a name for the sky and the dawn, but these names
were so distinctly felt as appellatives, that they did not
become proper names for the gods. There is, however,
none the less a large body of Semitic myth awaiting
that scientific criticism which has been applied with
such signal success to Aryan myth, and when the re
straint imposed by artificial notions concerning the
exceptional character of the writings embodied in the
Old Testament are removed, the mythology of the Jews
and of kindred races will contribute its share of evidence
in support of the similar conditions under which it
is held that myth has its birth and growth. Already
the identity of some Semitic myths with Aryan myths is
apparent, such as those relating to the Creation, the
Deluge, the building of Babel, the passage of the Red
Sea, the translation of Elijah, and the stories of Abraham
and Isaac, of Joseph, and of Job; while Delilah has
her representatives in Hindu and Horse legends; the
strength of Samson challenges comparison with that of
Hercules ; and the story of Jonah’s fish is related to a
group of legends with which the Greek myth of Herakles
and Hesione, and the nursery tales of Tom Thumb swal
lowed by the cow, and Little Red Riding Hood by the wolf,
are intimately associated. As a concluding illustration,
the originals of the familiar “house that Jack built,”
and of the “ old woman who couldn’t get her pig over
�Survival in Folk-Lore^ Legend^ and Dogma.
23
the stile,” appear to exist in a poem regarded by some
Jews as a parable concerning the past and future of the
Holy Land. It begins, “ A kid, a kid, my father bought
for two pieces of money;” and it goes on to tell how a
cat came and ate the kid, and a dog came and bit the
cat, and so on to the end. “ Then came the Holy One,
blessed be He! and slew the angel of death, who slew the
butcher, who killed the ox, that drank the water, that
quenched the fire, that burnt the stick, that beat the
dog, that bit the cat, that ate the kid, that my father
bought for two pieces of money, a kid, a kid.” This
composition is in the “ Septer Haggadah,” and is
printed at the end of the Jews’ book of Passover ser
vices in Hebrew and English. (See ‘Halliwell’s Nur
sery Rhymes,’ pp. 112-17;’ ‘ Tylor’s Prim. Cult.’ I. 78.)
I am very conscious how inadequate the treatment of
this important subject has been ; but I hope that enough
has been said to indicate its importance in its intimate
relation to our present intellectual condition. Of its
survival in custom, traditional phrases, forgotten ety
mology of familiar words, occult sciences, &c., I have
had no time to speak, and all that must now be said by
way of final word is that Mythology, so far as it has
been investigated, points to conclusions concerning man’s
primitive state identical with those indicated by pre
historic Archaeology—namely, that the savage races of
to-day represent, not the degradation to which it is
asserted man has sunk, but the condition out of which
all races above the savage have emerged.
The advocates of the development-theory do not over
look tbe fact that civilization has been checked occa
sionally and locally, for both hemispheres witness to
that; neither do they forget that knowledge has been
here and there used as an instrument hurtful to culture,
nor that civilization intensifies vice as well as virtue;
but these do not militate against the general result—a
progress in which, marked as it is to-day, none of us see,
or, if healthily constituted, desire to see, finality.
FEINTED BY C. W. BEYNELL, LITTLE PULTENEY STREET, HAYMARKET.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
The birth and growth of myth, and its survival in folk-lore, legend and dogma.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Clodd, Edward [1840-1930]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 23 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: A lecture delivered before the Sunday Lecture Society on Sunday afternoon, 14th February, 1875. From the library of Dr Moncure Conway and part of the NSS pamphlet collection. Printed by C.W. Reynell, London.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Thomas Scott
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1875
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
CT126
CT2
N157
Subject
The topic of the resource
Mythology
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (The birth and growth of myth, and its survival in folk-lore, legend and dogma.), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Language
A language of the resource
English
Conway Tracts
Dogma
Folklore
Legends
Mythology
NSS