b. In addition to the explanatory myths, there are those having no claim to be in this class, although they have perhaps been originally suggested by some phenomenon of animate or inanimate nature. They are much less numerous than the others, since they do not answer multiple necessities of life. Such are the epic or heroic stories, popular tales, romances (which are found as early as ancient Egypt): it is the first appearance of that form of esthetic activity destined later to become literature. Here, the mythic activity suffers only a superficial metamorphosis—the essence is not changed. Literature is mythology transformed and adapted to the variable conditions of civilization. If this statement appear doubtful or disrespectful, we should note the following.
Historically, from myths wherein there figure at first only divine personages, there arise the epics of the Hindoos, Greeks, Scandinavians, etc., in which the gods and heroes are confounded, live in the same world, on a level. Little by little the divine character is rubbed out; the myth approaches the ordinary conditions of human life, until it becomes the romantic novel, and finally the realistic story.
Psychologically, the imaginative work that has at first created the gods and superior beings before whom man bows because he has unconsciously produced them, becomes more and more humanized as it becomes conscious; but it cannot cease being a projection of the feelings, ideas, and nature of man into the fictitious beings upon whom the belief of their creator and of his hearers confers an illusory and fleeting existence. The gods have become puppets whose master man feels himself, and whom he treats as he likes. Throughout the manifold techniques, esthetics, documentary collections, reproductions of the social life, the creative activity of the earliest time remains at bottom unchanged. Literature is a decadent and rationalized mythology.
III
Does the mythic activity of ancient times still exist among civilized peoples, unmodified as in literary creation, but in its pure form, as a non-individual, collective, anonymous, unconscious, work? Yes; as the popular imagination, when creating legends. In passing from natural phenomena to historic events and persons, the constructive imagination takes a slightly different position which we may characterize thus: legend is to myth what illusion is to hallucination.
The psychological mechanism is the same in both cases. Illusion and legend are partial imaginations, hallucination and myth are total imaginations. Illusion may vary in all shades between exact perception and hallucination; legend can run all the way from exact history to pure myth. The difference between illusion and hallucination is sometimes imperceptible; the same is sometimes true of legend and myth. Sensory illusion is produced by an addition of images changing perception; legend is also produced by an addition of images changing the historic personage or event. The only difference, then, is in the material used; in one case, a datum of sense, a natural phenomenon; in the other, a fact of history, a human event.
The psychological genesis of legends being thus established in general, what, according to the facts, are the unconscious processes that the imagination employs for creating them? We may distinguish two principal ones.
The first process is a fusion or combination. The myth precedes the fact; the historical personage or event enters into the mould of a pre-existing myth. "It is necessary that the mythic form be fashioned before one may pour into it, in a more or less fluid state, the historic metal." Imagination had created a solar mythology long before it could be incarnated by the Greeks in Hercules and his exploits. "There was historically a Roland, perhaps even an Arthur, but the greater part of the great deeds that the poetry of the Middle Ages attributes to them had been accomplished long before by mythological heroes whose very names had been forgotten."[64] At one time the man is completely hidden by the myth and becomes absolutely legendary; again, he assumes only an aureole that transfigures him. This is exactly what occurs in the simpler phenomenon of sensory illusion: now the real (the perception) is swamped by the images, is transformed, and the objective element reduced to almost nothing; at another time, the objective element remains master, but with numerous deformations.
The second process is idealization, which can act conjointly with the other. Popular imagination incarnates in a real man its ideal of heroism, of loyalty, of love, of piety, or of cowardice, cruelty, wickedness, and other abnormalities. The process is more complex. It presupposes in addition to mythic creation a labor of abstraction, through which a dominating characteristic of the historic personage is chosen and everything else is suppressed, cast into oblivion: the ideal becomes a center of attraction about which is formed the legend, the romantic tale. Compare the Alexander, the Charlemagne, the Cid of the Middle Age traditions to the character of history.
Even much nearer to us, this process of extreme simplification—which the law of mental inertia or of least effort is sufficient to explain—always persists: Lucretia Borgia remains the type of debauchery, Henry IV of good fellowship, etc. The protests of historians and the documentary evidence that they produce avail nothing: the work of the imagination resists everything.