Stories are always changing and losing their meanings, and from age to age new bards and tale-tellers shape the old myths into new forms to suit new hearers. Considering how stories thus grow and change, one must expect their origins to be as often as not lost beyond recovery. While, as we have seen, it may be often possible to make out what they came from, this must be done cautiously. Clever writers are too apt to sit down and settle the mythic origin of any tale, as if this could be done by ingenious guessing. Even if it is nonsense and never was intended for anything else, the myth-interpreter can find a serious origin for it all the same. Thus a learned but rash mythologist declares that in our English nursery rhyme, “the cow jumped over the moon,” is a remnant of an old nature-myth, describing as a cow a cloud passing over the moon. What is really wanted in interpreting myths is something beyond simple guessing; there must be reasons why one particular guess is more probable than any other. It would have been rash to judge that Promētheus the fire-bringer is a personification of the wooden fire-drill ([p. 262]), were it not known that the Sanskrit name of this instrument is pramantha; taken together, the correspondence of name and nature amounts to a high probability that we have got back to the real origin of the Prometheus-legend. We may choose another example from the mythology of India, in the story of Vâmana, the tiny Brahman, who, to humble the pride of King Bali, begs of him as much land as he can measure in three steps, but when the boon is granted, the little dwarf expands into the gigantic form of Vishnu, and, striding with one step across the earth, another across the air, and a third across the sky, drives Bali down into the infernal regions, where he still reigns. This most remarkable of all the Tom Thumb stories seems really a myth of the sun, rising tiny above the horizon, then swelling into majestic power and crossing the universe. For Vâmana, the “dwarf,” is one of the incarnations of Vishnu, and Vishnu was originally the Sun. In the hymns of the Veda the idea of his three steps is to be found before it had become a story, when it was as yet only a poetic metaphor of the Sun crossing the airy regions in his three strides. “Vishnu traversed (the earth), thrice he put down his foot; it was crushed under his dusty step. Three steps hence made Vishnu, unharmed preserver, upholding sacred things.”
It remains to see how myths spread. Whenever a good story is told, whether real or made-up does not matter, it becomes part of the story-teller’s stock, who puts to it any new name that will suit, and often succeeds in planting it not only in popular legend, but even in history. There is a fragment by Demaratus preserved in the collection of Stobæus, where there is related with Greek names, as an episode of the history of Arkadia, the grand story which we were taught as an event of Roman history, the legend of the Horatii and Curiatii. Roman history, it seems, only borrowed it from an earlier tale, much as modern Swiss history borrowed from older folklore the tale of the archer and the apple, to adorn their national hero, Tell. To show how legend is put together from many sources, historical and mythical, let us take to pieces one of the famous children’s tales of Europe. Blue Beard was a historical person. He was Gilles de Retz, Sieur de Laval, Marshal of France, nicknamed Barbe Bleue from having a beard of blue-black shade. Persuaded by an Italian alchemist that his strength could be restored by bathing in the blood of infants, he had many children entrapped for this hideous purpose into his castle of Champtocé on the Loire, the ruins of which are still to be seen. At last the horrible suspicions of the country folk as to what was going on were brought to proof, and the monster was burnt at the stake at Nantes in 1440. In all this, however, there is not a word about murdered wives. Indeed the historical Blue Beard, in his character of murderous monster, seems to have inherited an older tale belonging to the wife-murderer of Breton legend, Comor the Cursed, Count of Poher, whose name and deeds are set down to near a thousand years earlier, in the legendary chronicles which tell of him as a usurper and tyrant who married and murdered one wife after another, till at last when he had wedded and killed the beautiful Trifine, vengeance overtook him, and he was defeated and slain by the rightful prince. It is not easy to say whether this is a version of a yet older story, or whether there is a historical foundation for it; if Henry VIII. of England had lived in those times, such a legend might have gathered round his name. Other points of the modern Blue Beard appear already in the story of Trifine, her sending for aid to her kinsmen when she knows her danger, and her discovery of the murder of the former wives. This last, however, does not come to pass in the modern way; in the legend, Trifine goes down into the chapel to pray in the hour of need, and there the tombs of the four murdered wives open and their corpses stand upright, each with the knife or cord or whatever she was murdered with in her hand. Instead of this powerful and ghastly scene, the modern version brings in the hackneyed episode of the forbidden chamber, which had long been the property of story-tellers for use on suitable occasions, and is to be found in the Arabian Nights. The old Trifine legend has a characteristic ending. Her wicked husband pursues her into the forest and cuts her head off, but St. Gildas makes her body carry it back to Comor’s castle, which he overthrows by flinging a handful of dust at it, then he puts Trifine’s head on for her again, and she retires into a convent for the rest of her life. The story-tellers of later times prefer a more cheerful if more commonplace finish.
The miracle-legend just quoted brings us back to the historical use of myth, which was spoken of earlier in this chapter. The story of St. Gildas bringing the fair Trifine back to her castle with her head in her hand, and his afterwards putting it back on her shoulders, is history. It records the intellectual state of the age when it was held edifying to tell such wonders of holy men, for holy men were believed able to do them. Old tales which seem extravagant to our minds are apt thus to have historical value by pointing back to the times when, seeming possible, they were made. This is true even of Æsop’s fables. In the stage of thought when human souls are thought able to live in animals’ bodies, when a wolf may have one’s enemy’s soul in him, or one’s grandfather may be crawling on the hearth in the body of a snake, stories of rational beasts themselves seem rational. Among the Buddhists, where beast-tales early became moral apologues, they are told as incidents of the many births or transmigrations of the great founder of the religion. It was Buddha himself who, as a bird, took the bone out of the lion’s throat, and was repaid by being told that he was lucky to be so well out of it. It was Buddha who, born in the body of a peasant, listened to the ass in the lion’s skin, and said he was but an ass. That millions of people should have this as part of their sacred literature is a fact of interest in the study of civilization, warning us not to cast aside a story as worthless, because it is mythical. For understanding the thoughts of old-world nations, their myths tell us much we should hardly learn from their history.
CHAPTER XVI.
SOCIETY.
Social Stages, [401]—Family, [402]—Morals of Lower Races, [405]—Public Opinion and Custom, [408]—Moral Progress, [410]—Vengeance and Justice, [414]—War, [418]—Property, [419]—Legal Ceremonies, [423]—Family Power and Responsibility, [426]—Patriarchal and Military Chiefs, [428]—Nations, [432]—Social Ranks, [434]—Government, [436].
In the reports of crimes which appear daily in the newspapers of our civilized land, such phrases often occur as savage fury, barbarous cruelty. These two words have come to mean in common talk such behaviour as is most wild, rough, and cruel. Now no doubt the life of the less civilized people of the world, the savages and barbarians, is more wild, rough, and cruel than ours is on the whole, but the difference between us and them does not lie altogether in this. As the foregoing chapters have proved, savage and barbarous tribes often more or less fairly represent stages of culture through which our own ancestors passed long ago, and their customs and laws often explain to us, in ways we should otherwise have hardly guessed, the sense and reason of our own. It should be understood that it is out of the question to give here even a summary of the complicated systems of society: all that can be done is to put before the reader some of its leading principles in ancient and modern life.
Mankind can never have lived as a mere struggling crowd, each for himself. Society is always made up of families or households bound together by kindly ties, controlled by rules of marriage and the duties of parent and child. Yet the forms of these rules and duties have been very various. Marriages may be shifting and temporary pairing, or unions where the husband may have several wives, and the wife several husbands. It is often hard to understand the family group and its ties in the rude and ancient world. Thus it seems to us a matter of course to reckon family descent in the male line, and this is now put in the clearest way by the son taking the father’s surname. But in lower stages of civilization, on both sides of the globe, many tribes take the contrary idea as a matter of course. In most Australian tribes the children belong to the mother’s clan, not the father’s; so that in native wars father and son constantly meet as natural enemies. Chiefship often goes down in the royal mother’s line, as among the Natchez, who had their sun-temples in what is now Louisiana. Yet this wide-spread law of female descent, deep as it lies in the history of society, had been so lost sight of among the ancient civilized nations, that when Herodotus noticed it among the Lykians, who took their names from their mothers and traced their pedigrees through the female branches only, the historian fancied this was a peculiar custom, in which they were unlike all other people. In the savage and barbaric world there prevails widely the rule called by McLennan exogamy or marrying-out, which forbids a man to take a wife of his own clan—an act which is considered criminal, and may even be punished with death. It is a strange contrast to the popular idea that savage life has no rules, when we find Australian tribes where every man is bound to marry into the particular clan which is, so to speak, the wife-clan to his own. Among the Iroquois of North America the children took the clan-name or totem of the mother; so if she were of the Bear clan, her son would be a Bear, and accordingly he might not marry a Bear girl, but might take a Deer or Heron. Such laws appear also among higher nations who reckon descent in the male line. Thus in India a Brahman is not to marry a wife whose clan-name (her “cow-stall,” as they say) is the same as his; nor may a Chinese take a wife of his own surname. Though the family and tribe rules of the savage and barbaric world are too intricate to be fully discussed here, there are some instructive points to which attention should be called. Marriage is in early stages of society a civil contract. Thus, among the wild hunting-tribes of Nicaragua, the lad who wishes a girl for a wife kills a deer and lays it with a heap of firewood at the door of her parents’ hut, which symbolic act is his offer to hunt and do man’s work; if the gift is accepted, it is a marriage, without further ceremony. Among peoples of higher culture more formal promises and ceremonies come in, with feasts and gatherings of kinsfolk; and then, as in other important matters of life, the priest is called in to give divine blessing and sanction to the union. Where this is done, a wedding has come to be very different from what it was in the rough times of marriage by capture, such as might be seen in our own day among fierce forest tribes in Brazil, where the warriors would make forays on distant villages and by main force bring home wives. Ancient tradition knows this practice well, as where the men of Benjamin carry off the daughters of Shiloh dancing at the feast, and in the famous Roman tale of the rape of the Sabines, a legend putting in historical form the wife-capture which in Roman custom remained as a ceremony. What most clearly shows what a recognised old-world custom it was, is its being thus kept up as a formality where milder manners really prevail. It had passed into this state among the Spartans, when Plutarch says that though the marriage was really by friendly settlement between the families, the bridegroom’s friends went through the pretence of carrying off the bride by violence. Within a few generations the same old habit was kept up in Wales, where the bridegroom and his friends, mounted and armed as for war, carried off the bride; and in Ireland they used even to hurl spears at the bride’s people, though at such a distance that no one was hurt, except now and then by accident, as happened when one Lord Hoath lost an eye, which mischance seems to have put an end to this curious relic of antiquity. It was one of the consequences of increase of property in the world, that the practice of buying wives came in, as where a Zulu bargains with a girl’s people to let him have her perhaps for five oxen or ten. This was the custom in England among our barbaric forefathers, as appears in the West-Saxon law of Ine—“If a man buy a wife,” &c. Cnut somewhat later forbade the wife to be sold, but the husband might give something of his own will. It is an interesting problem in the history of law how the money once paid as the bride’s price passed into a gift or dower for her; some provision of this kind became necessary when the widow was no longer provided for by being taken, as she would have been in a ruder state of society, as a wife by her husband’s brother.
Marriage has been here spoken of first, because upon it depends the family, on which the whole framework of society is founded. What has been said of the ruder kinds of family union among savages and barbarians shows that there cannot be expected from them the excellence of those well-ordered households to which civilized society owes so much of its goodness and prosperity. Yet even among the rudest clans of men, unless depraved by vice or misery and falling to pieces, a standard of family morals is known and lived by. Their habits, judged by our notions, are hard and coarse, yet the family tie of sympathy and common interest is already formed, and the foundations of moral duty already laid, in the mother’s patient tenderness, the father’s desperate valour in defence of home, their daily care for the little ones, the affection of brothers and sisters, and the mutual forbearance, helpfulness, and trust of all. From the family this extends to a wider circle. The natural way in which a tribe is formed is from a family or group, which in time increases and divides into many households, still recognising one another as kindred, and this kinship is so thoroughly felt to be the tie of the whole tribe, that, even when there has been a mixture of tribes, a common ancestor is often invented to make an imaginary bond of union. Thus kindred and kindness go together—two words whose common derivation expresses in the happiest way one of the main principles of social life.
Among the lessons to be learnt from the life of rude tribes is, how society can go on without the policeman to keep order. It is plain that even the lowest men cannot live quite by what the Germans call “faustrecht,” or “fist-right,” and we call “club law.” The strong savage does not rush into his weaker neighbour’s hut and take possession, driving the owner out into the forest with a stone-headed javelin sent flying after him. Without some control beyond the mere right of the stronger, the tribe would break up in a week, whereas in fact savage tribes last on for ages. Under favourable circumstances, where food is not too scarce nor war too wasting, the life of low barbaric races may be in its rude way good and happy. In the West Indian islands where Columbus first landed, lived tribes who have been called the most gentle and benevolent of the human race. Schomburgk, the traveller, who knew the warlike Caribs well in their home life, draws a paradise-like picture of their ways, where they have not been corrupted by the vices of the white men; he saw among them peace and cheerfulness and simple family affection, unvarnished friendship, and gratitude not less true for not being spoken in sounding words; the civilized world, he says, has not to teach them morality, for though they do not talk about it, they live in it. At the other side of the world in New Guinea, Kops, the Dutch explorer, gives much the same account of the Papuans of Dory, who live in houses built on piles in the water, like the old lake-men of Switzerland; he speaks of their mild disposition, their inclination to right and justice, their strong moral principles, their respect for the aged and love for their children, their living without fastenings to their houses—for theft is considered by them a grave offence, and rarely occurs. Among the rude non-Hindu tribes of India, English officials have often recorded with wonder the kindliness and cheerfulness of the rude men of the mountains and the jungle, and their utter honesty in word and deed. Thus Sir Walter Elliot mentions a low poor tribe of South India, whom the farmers employ to guard their fields, well knowing that they would starve rather than steal the grain in their charge; and they are so truthful that their word is taken at once in disputes even with their richer neighbours, for people say “a Kurubar always speaks the truth.” Of course these accounts of Caribs and Papuans show them on the friendly side, while those who have fought with them call them monsters of ferocity and treachery. But cruelty and cunning in war seem to them right and praiseworthy; and what we are here looking at is their home peace-life. It is clear that low barbarians may live among themselves under a fairly high moral standard, and this is the more instructive because it shows what may be called natural morality. Among them religion, mostly concerned with propitiating souls of ancestors and spirits of nature, has not the strong moral influence it exerts among higher nations; indeed their behaviour to their fellows is little affected by divine command or fear of divine punishment. It has more to do with their life being prosperous or miserable. When want or the miseries of war upset their well-being, they (like their betters) become more brutal and selfish in their ways, and moral habits are at all times low among the comfortless hordes of savages whose daily struggle for existence is too harsh for the gentler feelings to thrive. Moreover, there is this plain difference between low and high races of men, that the dull-minded barbarian has not power of thought enough to come up to the civilized man’s best moral standard. The wild man of the forest, forgetful of yesterday and careless of to-morrow, lolling in his hammock when his wants are satisfied, has little of the play of memory and foresight which is ever unrolling before our minds the panorama of our own past and future life, and even sets us in thought in the places of our fellows, to partake of their lives and enter into their joys and sorrows. Much of the wrong-doing of the world comes from want of imagination. If the drunkard could see before him the misery of next year with something of the vividness of the present craving, it would overbalance it. Ofttimes in the hottest fury of anger, the sword has been sheathed by him across whose mind has flashed the prophetic picture of the women weeping round the blood-stained corpse. The lower races of men are so wanting in foresight to resist passion and temptation, that the moral balance of a tribe easily goes wrong, while they are rough and wantonly cruel through want of intelligent sympathy with the sufferings of others, much as children are cruel to animals through not being able to imagine what the creatures feel. What we now know of savage life will prevent our falling into the fancies of the philosophers of the last century, who set up the “noble savage” as an actual model of virtue to be imitated by civilized nations. But the reality is quite as instructive, that the laws of virtue and happiness may be found at work in simple forms among tribes who make hatchets of sharpened stones and rub sticks together to kindle fire. Their life, seen at its best, shows with unusual clearness the great principle of moral science, that morality and happiness belong together—in fact that morality is the method of happiness.