Here the strange poem ends at its strangest moment, with the cry, which must have been uttered so often, but is heard here alone, of a people reluctantly deserting the gods that it has fashioned in its own likeness, for a faith that has not sprung from its needs or fears. Yet it cherishes the hope that this tyranny shall pass over: ‘they are gods, and behold they shall die, and the waves be upon them at last.’
As the ‘Kalevala,’ and as all relics of folklore, all Märchen and ballads prove, the lower mythology—the elemental beliefs of the people—do survive beneath a thin covering of Christian conformity. There are, in fact, in religion, as in society, two worlds, of which the one does not know how the other lives. The class whose literature we inherit, under whose institutions we live, at whose shrines we worship, has changed as outworn raiment its manners, its gods, its laws; has looked before and after, has hoped and forgotten, has advanced from the wilder and grosser to the purest faith. Beneath the progressive class, and beneath the waves of this troublesome world, there exists an order whose primitive form of human life has been far less changeful, a class which has put on a mere semblance of new faiths, while half-consciously retaining the remains of immemorial cults.
Obviously, as M. Fauriel has pointed out in the case of the modern Greeks, the life of such folk contains no element of progress, admits no break in continuity. Conquering armies pass and leave them still reaping the harvest of field and river; religions appear, and they are baptised by thousands, but the lower beliefs and dreads that the progressive class has outgrown remain unchanged.
Thus, to take the instance of modern Greece, the high gods of the divine race of Achilles and Agamemnon are forgotten, but the descendants of the Penestæ, the villeins of Thessaly, still dread the beings of the popular creed, the Nereids, the Cyclopes, and the Lamia.[181]
The last lesson we would attempt to gather from the ‘Kalevala’ is this: that a comparison of the thoroughly popular beliefs of all countries, the beliefs cherished by the non-literary classes whose ballads and fairy tales have only recently been collected, would probably reveal a general identity, concealed by diversity of name, among the ‘lesser people of the skies,’ the elves, fairies, cyclopes, giants, nereids, brownies, lamiæ. It could then be shown that some of these spirits survive among the lower beings of the mythology of what the Germans call a cultur-volk like the Greeks or Romans. It could also be proved that much of the narrative element in the classic epics is to be found in a popular or childish form in primitive fairy tales. The question would then come to be, Have the higher mythologies been developed, by artistic poets, out of the materials of a race which remained comparatively untouched by culture; or are the lower spirits, and the more simple and puerile forms of myth, degradations of the inventions of a cultivated class? In the majority of cases, the former theory is correct.
FOOTNOTES:
[172] Talvj, Charakteristik der Volkslieder, p. 3.
[173] Fauriel, Chants de la Grèce moderne.
[174] Thus Scotland scarcely produced any ballads, properly speaking, after the Reformation. The Kirk suppressed the dances to whose motion the ballad was sung in Scotland, as in Greece, Provence, and France.
[175] L. Preller’s Ausgewählte Aufsätze. Greek ideas on the origin of Man. It is curious that the myth of a gold, a silver, and a copper race occurs in South America. See Brasseur de Bourbourg’s Notes on the Popol Vuh.