Conscious that the best verbal definitions that can be given fail to define or precisely indicate the generally accepted character of the Grecian myth, we unconsciously multiply words and amplify their meanings, till the attempt becomes rather descriptive than definitive. Others, however acute and discerning, have had the same difficulty. In his attempt to tell us just what a myth is, Dr. McClintock says: “It is best described as a spontaneous product of the youthful imagination of mankind—the natural form under which the infant race expressed its conceptions and convictions about supernatural relations, and prehistoric events. It is neither fiction, ordinary history, nor philosophy; it is a spoken poetry, an uncritical and child-like history, a sincere and self-believing romance. It does not invent, but simply imagines and repeats; it may err, but it never lies. It is a narration, generally marvelous, which no one consciously or scientifically invents, and which every one unintentionally falsifies.” “It is,” says Mr. Grote, “the natural effusion of the unlettered, imaginative, believing man.” “It belongs to an age in which the mind was credulous, or confiding, the imagination full of vigor and vivacity, the passions earnest and intense. Its very essence consists in the projection of thought into the sphere of facts; and it arises partly from the unconscious and gradual objectizing of the subjective, or the confusing of mental processes with external realities; that is, from imaginatively attributing to external nature the feelings and qualities which exist only in the percipient soul.”
Myths, then, belong to that period of human progress in which the untaught mind regards “history as all a fairy tale.” Before the dawn of science, and the increase of knowledge by the general dissemination of books, men’s fancies respecting the past, and the uncertain conjectures of their nascent philosophy could be preserved only by these traditional and semi-poetical tales of the mythologists. To borrow the fine expression of Tacitus—Fingunt simul creduntque—“They at once fabricate and believe.”
“The real and the ideal,” again says Mr. Grote, “were blended together in the primitive conceptions.… The myth passed unquestioned from the fact of its currency, and its harmony with existing sentiments and preconceptions.” So to the intensity of a fresh, undisciplined imagination, and the paucity of terms in the language yet in its extreme adolescence, the origin of a vast number of myths can easily be traced. “In those early days men looked at all things with the large open eyes of childish wonderment, and much of what they saw was incapable of any other than a metaphorical description at their hands. They had no words for the purpose, and if the language had been richer it would have responded less accurately to their thoughts, since they transferred their own feelings and sentiments to the world about them, and made themselves the measure of all things.” “Thus,” says one, “the hunter regarded the moon which glanced rapidly along the clouded heavens, as a beaming goddess with her nymphs,” and
Sunbeams upon distant hills,
Gilding space with shadows in their train,
Might, with small help from fancy, be transferred
Into fleet Oreads, sporting visibly.—Wordsworth.
Among a race of unlettered, but intellectually active, stalwart men, on whose path science shed but a dim, uncertain light, even natural phenomena so imperfectly understood, and many things in the realm of the spiritual and unseen being imaginatively conceived, and described in metaphors, myths must abound. Nor is it wonderful that those belonging to a remote prehistoric age are sometimes shrouded in a veil of impenetrable mystery.
We may not be able to reach their true meaning, since when personifications are so manifold, it is often impossible for us to tell just what was regarded as fancy and what was believed to be fact. It is worthy of remark that the same is as true of the grotesque incredible legends current among semi-barbarian tribes at the present day, as in the earliest Grecian myths. In many of them there is a substratum of facts, of which there was some rather shadowy knowledge; after some progress, and the introduction of letters among them, their guesses and imaginings that were uttered in metaphorical expressions not fully understood, are in a manner evaporated, or crystallize into dogmas that are accepted as parts of the tribal faith.
So the more ancient narratives, that are called mythological, as we will hereafter see, when collected, systematized and written by masters in the art, have a value not only as indicating the incipient, though imperfect development of the race, but in most cases, after the winnowing processes applied have driven away the chaff, some kernels of truth will remain, more than enough to repay those who mostly study them as interesting relics of a primitive society, the earnest, impassioned deliverances of nature’s children, yet unsophisticated by “philosophy falsely so called.”