[MYTHS AND MYTH-MONGERS.][69]
This bald, unjointed chat of his, my lord, I answered indirectly—Shakespeare, Henry IV.
Authors are proverbially not the best judges of their own works. It is as rare, therefore, as it is gratifying to meet with one whose verdict on his own production exactly coincides with that of the critic. Such a fortunate concurrence of opinion between the writer and the person to whose lot it has fallen to pass sentence on a work for a certain portion of the public, relieves the latter gentleman of a vast amount of responsibility, and renders his difficult task infinitely lighter and more pleasant than such a task generally proves to be.
When, then, Mr. Fiske, the author of Myths and Myth-Makers, is kind enough gratuitously to inform us in his preface that the “series of papers” of which his book is composed is “somewhat rambling and unsystematic,” it can be considered no injustice to him, and no presumption on our part, to say that we cordially agree with him. And when he further informs us that, “in order to avoid confusing the reader with intricate discussions, he has sometimes cut the matter short by expressing himself with dogmatic definiteness where a sceptical vagueness might perhaps have been more becoming,” we find nothing whatever to object to in this statement, with the solitary exception of the word “perhaps,” which, if suppressed, would bring it nearer the exact truth.
However, Mr. Fiske has here furnished us with a very fair idea, of what the reader is to expect from his Myths. He himself has passed sentence on himself. He tells us practically that we must not expect too much from his “rambling” papers; he forestalls, if he does not deprecate, criticism by assuring us at the outstart that his fault has not been on the side of modesty of opinion and judicial weighing of what he set forth. What, then, is left for the critic to do but to confirm the self-condemnation of the author?
But we cannot allow Mr. Fiske to escape us in this fashion. Mr. Fiske is an M.A., and Mr. Fiske is an LL.B., and a professor, and a professor of philosophy—at Harvard, too. So that, although the dates so carefully affixed to the end of each of his “rambling and unsystematic” papers indicate that Mr. Fiske knocked this book off in three months, still three months of philosophic chaff from a Harvard professor ought surely to contain some grains of wheat.
The book in itself is not an uninteresting one. It is chock-full of mythical stories, or folk-lore, or whatever people may please to call what in our younger days we should have comprised under the one delicious head of fairy-tales. To be sure, the stories were all told before and by somebody else; but then, Mr. Fiske gives everybody due credit, and confines his own portion of the work to a running commentary with an undercurrent of foot-notes, and all sorts of quotations, from the Rig-Veda down to Jack and Jill. We cannot in justice say that Mr. Fiske’s portion is as interesting as the myths themselves, though partaking considerably of their character.
But to come to the point—what does Mr. Fiske mean by his book? What idea would he convey to us? What would he have us infer from it? “A book’s a book, although there’s nothing in’t.”
If it is suggestive of anything at all, it is this: all or the chief portion of the great myths of antiquity refer to the struggle between darkness and light. It was the phenomenon of night and day which puzzled people in the dawn of the world, ages before men possessed the great blessing of this XIXth century, which blessing is, according to Mr. Fiske, via M. Littré, “scientific faith,” seemingly the only sure thing in this enlightened age.
Some people might require a definition of this wonderful faith of modern invention; but then, some people always will ask disagreeable questions. For their benefit, it may be said to mean taking nothing for fact or truth except what you can arrive at, or prove, or demonstrate by a scientific process: in plain English, no faith at all.