Studies of the Greek Poets (Vol 1 of 2)

by John Addington Symonds

The theory of development which seems to underlie the linguistic doctrine is, that thought in its earliest stage is positive and clear and adequate. The first savage who thinks sees the sun, for example, and calls it the sun; but in talking about the sun he begins to use figurative language, and so converts his simple propositions into myths. At this point, argues the philologer, he goes wrong and becomes the victim of delusions. The fallacy in this view appears to lie in attributing to the simple and sensuous apprehension of the savage the same sort of simplicity as that which we have gained by a process of abstraction, and consequently inferring that the importation of fancy into the thinking process implies a species of degeneracy. The truth seems rather to be quite the contrary. If we grant, for the sake of argument, that the first thoughts are in a certain sense simple, they have nothing in common with the generalizations of the understanding. Except in relation to immediate perceptions, their generality is empty until it has been filled up with the varied matter of the senses and the imagination. Mythology and poetry are, therefore, an advance upon the primitive prose of simple apprehension. What was a mere round ball becomes a dædal world; and it is not till the full cycle of the myth-creating fancy has been exhausted that the understanding can return upon a higher level by abstraction to intellectual simplicity. The same is true about theology. The first dim sense of the divine in nature as a unity may possibly have been prior to the many deities of polytheism; men may have looked upon the open sky and called that god. Yet it was not a retrogression, but an advance from that first perception to the mythological fulness and variety which gave concreteness to the notion of the deity. In this way the whole content of human nature—feeling, sense, activity, and so forth—was imported into the original and hollow notion; or, to state the process with greater accuracy, the germ of thought, by unfolding its potentiality, showed that what had seemed a barren unit was a complicated organism with a multiplicity of parts. It remained for a further stage of thought, by reflection and abstraction, to return at a higher level to the conception of intellectual unity. What we have to guard against is the temptation to attribute our own abstractedness, the definiteness of positivism, the purity of monotheism, to the first stage of thought. Ours is the triumph of the understanding in its vigor over bewildering fulness; theirs was the poverty and nakedness of a first awakening of intelligence. The same critique might be applied to the theory that language starts with universals. Here, again, all turns upon the question, What sort of universals? Unless we are cautious, we run the risk of ending in a view almost identical with the theory of primitive revelation, by following which to its conclusions we are forced to regard the history of the human race, not as a process of development, but as a series of disastrous errors and of gradual decline.

What remains the solid outcome of the linguistic theory is that in the mythopœic age, when there was no criticism and no reflection possible, the idola fori were far more powerful than now, and consequently many legends were invented to account for words of which the true meaning had been forgotten. Accordingly philology is one of the keys by which the door of mythology may be unlocked. At the same time, considering the complex relations of thought to language, especially in their commencement, it is wrong to concentrate attention upon language. In like manner, it will be admitted that the genders of the nouns contributed their quota to the personification of female and male deities; but it would be wrong to argue that the numina were divided into male and female because the nomina were so distinguished. In order to appreciate the personifying instinct, we must go back in imagination to a point beyond the divergence of thought and language; and we shall find that if priority can be assigned to either, it will be to thought, as that by which alone the human subject can be said to be. Language has sex because sex is a property of the talking being. The deities are male and female, not because their names have genders, but because the thinking being, for whom sex is all-important, thinks its own conditions into the world outside it.

The linguistic theory for the interpretation of mythology is based upon comparative philology, which has proved beyond all contest that the Aryan races had not only their grammar, but a certain number of their myths in common before the separation of the Hindoo, Hellenic, and Teutonic stocks. The Vedic literature exhibits the mythological material in rudiment, and its style approximates to that of poetry. Hence it has been assumed that the disease of language was less virulent in the oldest Aryan writings than it afterwards became in Hesiod and Homer—the nomina had not as yet been so utterly deformed and corrupted into numina. The inefficiency of arguments like this is that they have no value except in relation to a previously adopted view. To the opponent of the linguistic as the only scientific method for the explanation of myths, it is left to answer: What you regard as corruption of language I regard as development of thought. What interests me in Greek mythology is precisely this: that the Aryan poems have passed into complicated stories illustrative of pure Hellenic modes of thought and feeling, which in their turn will give occasion for epics, dramas, statues, and philosophies. In the same way, the amount of similarity which comparative mythology has demonstrated in the myths of all the members of the Aryan family is, from the Greek historian's point of view, far less important than their differences. The similarity belongs to the stock as it existed in prehistoric times. The differences mark the external conditions and internal qualities of the nations as they played their part in the world's history. The "disease of language" which severally afflicted the Hindoos, the Persians, the Greeks, and the Scandinavians, turns out to be a faithful mirror of their concrete life. Any one, by way of illustration, can work out the problem of national psychology offered by the nature-worship of the sun in Ormuzd, in Phœbus, and in Balder. The pale and beautiful Balder, who must perish, and whose death involves the world in wailing; the radiant and conquering Phœbus, the healing deity, the purifier, the voice of prophecy and poetry and music; Ormuzd, the antagonist of darkness and of evil, the object of desire and adoration to the virtuous and pure—these sun-gods answer to the races, as their geographical conditions and their spirit made them. Nor is this all. The mythology of each nation has a physiognomy and character of its own—that of the Greeks being clearness and articulation in opposition to the formlessness and misty vagueness of the Hindoos. To mistake a Greek tale of deity or hero for a Hindoo tale of deity or hero is impossible. While the student of prehistorical antiquities will, therefore, direct attention to the likeness revealed by comparative mythology, the historian of nations will rather be attracted by those differences which express themselves in mature art, literature, and religion.[10]

One of the most salient points of similarity between the several families of Aryan myths concerns those which are called solar legends. In all of these we read of children fated to slay their fathers, of strong giants condemned to obey the rule of feeble princes, of heroic young men forced to quit their first love for another woman. The heroes of these stories are marked out in their cradle by miraculous signs and wonders, or are suckled by wild beasts in the absence of their parents; in their youth they slay serpents sent to destroy them; in their manhood they shine forth as conquerors. Their death is not unfrequently caused by slight and unforeseen, though fated, occurrences—by a weapon that strikes the only vulnerable part of their body, in the case of Achilles and Siegfried; by a twig of mistletoe, in the case of Balder; by a thorn, in the case of Isfendiyar; by an envenomed mantle, in the case of Herakles. One great mythus fascinated the imagination of Norsemen and Hindoos, Greek and Persian, German and Roman; interwove itself with their history; gave a form to their poetry; and assumed a prominent place in their religion. So far, it may be said that comparative philology has established something solid, which is at the same time of vast importance for the student of prehistorical antiquity. It is also not improbable that these legends referred originally to the vicissitudes of the sun in his yearly and daily journeys through the heavens. Thus much may be conceded to the solar theorists, remembering always that this primitive astronomical significance, if it existed, was forgotten by the races for whom the myths became the material of poetry and religion. But, unfortunately, the discovery has been strained beyond its proper limits by students who combine a solar theory with the linguistic in their interpretation of mythology. In their hands all the myths are made to refer to the sun and the moon, to dawn and evening. "The difficulty," says Max Müller, "which I myself have most keenly felt is the monotonous character of the dawn and sun legends. Is everything the dawn? is everything the sun? This question I had asked myself many times before it was addressed me by others." How consistently Professor Max Müller found himself obliged to answer this question in the affirmative is known to every student of his works, not to mention those of Mr. Cox. The hand-books of mythology which are now in vogue in England expound this solar theory so persistently that it is probable a race is growing up who fancy that the early Greeks talked with most "damnable iteration" of nothing but the weather, and that their conversation on that fruitful topic fell sick of some disease, breeding the tales of Thebes and Achilles and Pelops's line, as a child breeds measles. It is therefore necessary to subject it to criticism.

The first point for notice is that mythology lends itself almost as well to meteorological as to solar theories. Kuhn and Schwartz, as Professor Müller himself informs us, arrived at the conclusion that "originally the sun was conceived implicitly as a mere accident in the heavenly scenery." Instead, therefore, of finding the sun and the dawn in all the myths, they are always stumbling upon clouds and winds and thunder. This differing of the doctors is, after all, no great matter. Yet it warns us to be careful in adopting so exclusively, as is the present fashion, either the solar or the meteorological hypothesis. A second consideration which inclines to caution is the facility of adapting the solar theory to every story, whether fabulous or historical. In this sense the famous tract which proved that Napoleon the Great only existed in the mythical imagination may be taken as a reductio ad absurdum of the method. A third ground for suspension of judgment lies in the very elaborate manipulation which the etymologies of such words as Eros, Erinnys, and the Charites have undergone before they yielded up their solar content. But the multiplication of general objections is not to the present purpose. It is enough to bear in mind that, however important the sun was to the ancient Aryans, he could not have been everything: he was, after all, but one among many objects of interest; and what requires to be still more remembered, is that the Greeks themselves in dealing with the tales of Achilles, or of Kephalos and Prokris, did not know that they were handling solar stories. It is, therefore, misleading to base hand-books which serve as introductions to Greek literature and art upon speculation about the solar groundwork of the myths. In the works of Homer and Hesiod, of Æschylus and Sophocles, the myths were animated with spiritual, intellectual, and moral life. To draw the lessons from them which those poets drew, to demonstrate the grandeur of the imagination which could deal with those primeval tragic tales, should be the object of the educator; not to fill his pages with extremely doubtful matter about sun and dawn ad infinitum. The true relation of the solar theory to a Greek myth may be illustrated by the tale of Herakles, whom the Greeks themselves may perhaps have recognized as a solar deity, since Herodotus identified him with a Phœnician god.[11] We are therefore justified in dealing with this hero as a personification of the sun. Herakles is the child of Zeus. He strangles in his cradle the serpents of the night. He loves Iole, or the violet-colored clouds of dawn. He performs twelve labors, corresponding to the twelve months of the solar year. He dies of a poisoned robe amid flames that may be taken for the blood-red sunset clouds. The maiden Iole, now evening and not morning, visits him again in death; and he ascends from his funeral pyre of empurpled mountain peaks to heaven. Let all this be granted. So far the solar theory carries us. But is this all? In other words, is this, which the current hand-books tell us about Herakles, the pith of the matter as it appeared to the Greeks? When we turn to the Philosophy of History of Hegel, who worked by another than the solar method, and was more anxious to discover thoughts than etymologies, we read: "Hercules is among the Hellenes that spiritual humanity which, by native energy, attains Olympus through the twelve far-famed labors; but the foreign idea that lies at the basis is the sun completing its revolution through the twelve signs of the Zodiac." Here we touch the truth. The solar foundation of the mythus is wholly valueless and unimportant—in other words, is alien to its essence, when compared with the moral import it acquired among the Greeks. It is the conception of life-long service to duty, of strength combined with patience, of glory followed at the cost of ease, of godhead achieved by manhood through arduous endeavor—it is this that is really vital in the myth of Herakles. By right of this the legend entered the sphere of religion and of art. In this spirit the sophist enlarged upon it, when he told how Herakles in his youth chose virtue with toil rather than pleasure, incorporating thus the high morality of Hesiod with the mythical element. If myths like these are in any sense diseased words about the sun, we must go further and call them immortalized words, words that have attained eternal significance by dying of the disease that afflicted them. The same remarks apply to all the solar and lunar stories—to Achilles, Endymion, Kephalos, and all the rest. As solar myths these tales had died to the Greeks. As poems, highly capable of artistic treatment, in sculpture, or in verse, pregnant with humanity, fit to form the subject of dramatic presentation or ethical debate, they retained incalculable value. The soul of the nation was in them. And that is their value for us.

To deny the important part which the sun, like the earth or the sea, played in early mythology would be absurd. To dispute the illumination which comparative philology has thrown not only upon the problem of the myths, but also upon the early unity of races until recently divided in our thought, would be still more ridiculous. The point at issue is simply this, that in Greek mythology there is far more than linguistic and solar theories can explain, and that more is precisely the Greek genius. The philologer from his point of view is justified in directing attention to the verbal husk of myths; but the student of art and literature must keep steadily in view the kernel of thought and feeling which the myths contain. It is only by so doing that the poetry and art which sprang from them can be intelligently studied. Thus the modern text-books of mythology are misleading, in so far as they draw the learner's mind away from subjects of historical importance to bare archæology.

As the result of analysis, the following propositions may be advanced. In the earliest ages the races to whom we owe languages and literature and art possessed a faculty which may be called the mythopœic, now almost wholly extinct, or rather superseded by the exercise of other faculties which it contained in embryo. The operation of this faculty was analogous to that of the poetic; that is to say, it was guided by the imagination more than by the dry light of the understanding, and its creative energy varied in proportion to the imaginative vigor of the race which exercised it. The distinction here introduced is all-important; for only thus can we explain the very different nature of the Greek and Roman religions. The tendency to personification which distinguishes mythology was due to the instinct of uncivilized humanity to impute to external objects a consciousness similar to that by which men are governed—in other words, to regard them as living agents with wills and passions like our own. If fetichism be the rudimentary phase of this instinct, polytheism indicates an advance by which the mind has passed from the mere recognition of spiritual power in nature to the investment of that power with personal and corporeal qualities. But just as the imagination varies in degree and force in different races, so will this power of carrying the personifying instinct onward into art be found to vary. The Romans stopped short at allegories; in other words, they did not carry their personification beyond the first stage. The Greeks created divine personalities. Many myths contain moral and philosophical ideas conveyed in parables, and some of them have indubitable reference to real events and persons. But in no case of a primitive and genuine mythus are we to expect deliberate fiction or conscious symbolism, or, again, to seek for a discoverable substratum of solid fact. Entering the sphere of mythology, facts become etherealized into fancies, the actual value of which lies in the expression of the national mind, so that mythical and spiritual are in this respect synonymous. To use a metaphor, a myth is a Brocken-spectre of the thought which produced it, and owes the features by which we can distinguish it to the specific character of the people among whom it sprang into existence. The analysis of language shows that the whole Aryan family held a great number of their myths in common, that many legends are stories told to account for words and phrases which had lost their original significance, and that in these stories the alternations of night and day and the procession of the seasons played a very important part. Philology can, however, furnish no more than the prolegomena to mythology. After hearing its report, the student of Greek art and literature must take the Greek myths at a Greek valuation—must consider what they were for the Athenians, for example, and not what they had once been. Finally, it may be remembered that to hope for a complete elucidation of a problem so far removed from observation and experiment would be vain. The conditions of the mythopœic age cannot be reconstituted; and were they to reappear through the destruction of civilizations, the reflective understanding would not be present to examine and record them.

The difficulty which besets the problem of mythology, owing to the remote antiquity of the myth-making age, is to some extent removed by observing the operation of the mythopœic faculty in the historic period. Given social circumstances similar, if even only in a limited degree, to those of the prehistoric age; given a defect of the critical and reflective faculty, an absence of fixed records, and a susceptible condition of the popular imagination, myths have always sprung up. While it is not, therefore, possible to find exact analogies to the conditions under which the Greek mythology originated, something may be gained by directing attention to mediæval romance. The legends which in Italy converted Virgil into a magician, the epic cycles of Charles the Great and Arthur, the Lives of the Saints, the fable of Tannhäuser and the Venusberg, the Spanish tale of Don Juan, and the German tale of Faust are essentially mythical. What is instructive about mediæval romance for the student of mythology in general is that here the mythopœic imagination has been either dealing with dim recollections of past history, or else has been constructing for itself a story to express a doctrine. After excluding the hypothesis of conscious working to a prefixed end, we, therefore, find in these legends an illustration of the sense in which the symbolical and rationalistic theories can be said to be justified. In the case of Virgil, the poetry of Rome's greatest singer never ceased to be studied during the darkest years of the dark ages, and his name was familiar even to people who could not read his verse. He was known to have been a pagan, and at the same time possessed with what then seemed like superhuman knowledge. It followed that he must have been a wizard, and have gained his power and wisdom by compelling fiends. Having formed this notion of Virgil, the popular fancy ascribed to him all the vast works of architecture and engineering which remained at Rome and Naples, inventing the most curious stories to explain why he had made them. When we turn to the Carlovingian cycle, we discover that the great name of the Frankish emperor, the memory of his wars, and the fame of his generals have survived and been connected with the crusading enthusiasm which pervaded Europe at a later period. Border-warfare between France and Spain plays a prominent part in this epic, and gradually the figure of Roland usurps upon the more historically important personages. To "dig for a supposed basis of truth" in the Carlovingian cycle would be vain; yet the view is forced upon us that without some historical basis the cycle would not have sprung into existence, or have formed a framework for the thought and feeling of one period of the Middle Ages. The achievements of Arthur must be regarded as still more wholly mythological. The more we inquire into his personality, the less we find of real historical subsistence. A Celtic hero, how created it is impossible to say, becomes the central figure of the most refined romance which occupied the attention of German, French, and British poets in the Middle Ages. Round the fictitious incidents of his biography gathers all that chivalry, with its high sense of humanity and its profound religious mysticism, conceived of purest and most noble; while, at the same time, certain dark and disagreeable details, especially the incestuous union from which Mordred sprang, remind us of the savage and unmoralized origin of the fable. We therefore find in the Arthurian cycle something very much analogous to the Tale of Troy. The dim memory of a national struggle, an astronomical myth, perchance, and many incidents of merely local interest have been blended together and filled with the very spirit of the ages and the races that delighted in the story as a story. This spiritual content gives its value to the epic. Mediæval hagiography furnishes abundant examples of the way in which facts transform themselves into fables and mythological material is moulded into shape around some well-remembered name, the religious consciousness externalizing itself in acts which it attributes to its heroes. When we read the Fioretti di San Francesco, we are well aware that the saint lived—his life is one of the chief realities of the thirteenth century; but we perceive that the signs and wonders wrought by him proceed from the imagination of disciples ascribing to St. Francis what belongs partly to the ideal of his own character and partly to that of monastic sanctity in general. In the fable of Tannhäuser we meet with another kind of reminiscence. There is less of fact and more of pure invention. The pagan past, existent as a sort of dæmonic survival, is localized at Hörsel. The interest, however, consists here wholly in the parabolic meaning—whether Tannhäuser ever existed does not signify. His legend is a poem of the Christian knight ensnared by sin, aroused to a sense of guilt, condemned by the supreme tribunal of the Church, and pardoned by the grace of God. In like manner, the lust for knowledge, for power, and for pleasure, withheld by God and nature, finds expression in the Faust legend; while inordinate carnal appetite is treated tragically in Don Juan. These three legends deserve to be called myths rather than poems in the stricter sense of the word, because they appear at many points and cannot be traced up to three definite artistic sources, while it is clear from their wide acceptance that they embodied thoughts which were held to be of great importance. In them, therefore, we find illustrated the theory which explains mythology by the analogy of poetry. That the mediæval myths which have been mentioned never attained the importance of Greek mythology is immediately accounted for by the fact that they sprang up, as it were, under the shadow of philosophy, religion, and history. They belonged to the popular consciousness; and this popular consciousness had no need or opportunity of converting its creatures into a body of beliefs, because both science and orthodoxy existed. In the historic period mythology must always occupy this subordinate position; and, perhaps, this fact might be reflected back as a further argument, if such were needed, against the theories that the Greek myths, while leading onward to the Greek Pantheon and Greek art, originated as an undergrowth beneath the decaying fabric of revealed truth or firmly apprehended philosophical ideas. At all events, both the positive and negative circumstances which we observe in them confirm the general view of mythology that has been advanced.