can get through the first six of the books. It is perhaps characteristic of a painter's imagination that he should care more for spatial than for plane geometry, and it is for this reason that I mention the fact. In referring to his schoolboy days he would often refer to those lads that had promised much and were never heard of afterwards. At King Edward's School in his time, though somewhat superior to him in age, were Archbishop Benson and Bishops Lightfoot and Westcott, so it is not difficult to guess whence he got his training in scholarship. Even after his return from his first sight of the Italians at Venice and elsewhere he was still struck by the power of Hogarth. Rubens he was inclined to laugh at, and with a few curves of his pencil would represent the luxuriant outlines of his Venuses.

This humour was the salt of his conversation, which lightened and brightened it, and gave it a catholicity rarely to be found among men. He would look at things in the broadest possible way, and while he saw them in their humorous side he made every allowance for the natural weaknesses of men and women. Though he would speak with the utmost frankness of his contemporaries, many of them reputed great, he never to my memory said anything really unkind of them. If he noticed a weakness, he would explain or excuse it.

He was the most manly of men in his judgment of things. Conventions did not exist for him; he would judge of actions entirely and solely by the intrinsic motive. Especially was this the case with the difficult problem of the relations between man and woman, where the inward feeling was to him the supreme guidance. Yet, while not in the slightest degree squeamish, he had the healthiest of tastes, and had no zest for smoking-room stories unless redeemed by real wit. Anything ugly or unsympathetic in human relations repelled him at once.

There was, indeed, a feeling of repugnance on his part from thinking of any of the injustices and cruelties of the world; unless something could be done to remedy them, he did not care to hear of them. While there was some hope of remedying the position of the Russian Jews he would willingly listen to their wrongs; but when it became obvious that no redress could be hoped for under present circumstances, he dismissed the subject as too painful and irremediable. So, too, when I told him that I had seen a bull-fight in Spain, he refused to listen any more, mainly on the ground that we could not alter the situation, and he let me know that he did not think the better of me for even having seen one. For he could perform that most difficult part of friendship, rebuke, with the most exquisite delicacy and yet with the firmest of moral dignity.

As he hated cruelty, so he despised contempt or irreverence. He told me with evident sympathy how Mr. Ruskin, when travelling with him in Italy, refused to look at any painting which represented

'the Scoffing of the Saviour.' With all his sense of humour, want of reverence was perhaps to him the deepest form of degradation in human character. It was perhaps for this reason that he cared little for critical results, especially when applied to the great historical objects of men's reverence. He did not care to read or hear about the critical results of modern scholarship about the Old Testament. After all,' he said, 'the new Bible which these scholars wish to create is not my Bible, our Bible, the Bible that has influenced humanity.'

He was naturally attracted as an artist towards the romantic and imaginative sides of Roman Catholicism. He once declared laughingly that his proper career would have been to be a wicked old cardinal, listening to Gregorian chants, and then, with a sudden transition, he proceeded to act the scene, tottering about and repeating in cracked but sonorous tones some verses of the Vulgate. Yet it was not unlikely that he had been touched by the agnosticism of his time. I remember quoting to him one of the fine sayings of the old Rabbis: Remember from whence you come, from a fœtid drop, and then remember before Whom you stand, before the Lord of lords, the King of kings.' He replied: 'I don't mind whence I come if I could only be sure I was standing before the Lord of lords.'

There was thus at the back of the great artist a great scholar, a noble character, a true and generous friend. In all that he did and said there was the simplicity and directness of greatness-moral and intellectual greatness. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about his life was the steadiness with which he pursued his work as long as the light lasted. Apart from his great works of imagination, there was what may be called the workmanly side of his character, the steadfast determination to do his due day's work. Alive to all the great spiritual movements of his time, he was equally or perhaps more concerned with the daily life and surroundings of the people. His great complaint against modern civilisation was that a workman could not turn out Lonest work that would last. He was determined in his own life to give an example to the contrary. Since the master had been differentiated from the workman there can never have been one who combined the best qualities of both to such a degree as Sir Edward Burne-Jones. Great as he was in his art, he was equally great as a man, and those of us who have had the honour and delight of knowing him with some intimacy can never hope again to meet one possessing so full a round of great qualities. Surely since Leonardo the world of art has never possessed a greater man than he.

JOSEPH JACOBS.

ARE SAVAGE GODS BORROWED FROM MISSIONARIES?

THE current theory of the evolution of religion is as generally known to the world as anything can be which does not appeal to the practical public. Variously stated by Darwin, Huxley, Mr. Herbert Spencer, Mr. Tylor, and the manual-makers, the current hypothesis is this: beginning with the idea of human souls, or ghosts, and with their propitiation, mankind, by ascending the steps of fetishes, departmental gods, nature gods, and polytheism generally, climbed to the conception of a Supreme Being. The advance of society to aristocracy and monarchy made it natural to imagine a heavenly Olympian aristocracy-the higher gods of polytheism—or a supreme being, a sort of heavenly king. In its early savage stages, according to the hypothesis, religion is non-moral, lending little or no sanction to ethics.

Now, if some of the lowest or most backward races of mankind are found to possess a faith in a moral, beneficent, powerful being, whose home is above the heavens, though these races neither sacrifice to ghosts, nor bow to kings, nor believe in departmental gods, nor in the nature-gods of polytheism, it is clear that the friends of the theory of Huxley, Darwin, Tylor, and Spencer are in a quandary. For here, among these low savages, is a god' where nae god should be.” Here is the effect—a relatively supreme being-without the alleged causes, ghost-worship, polytheism, aristocratic and monarchical society, worship of nature-gods, and all the rest.

It is probable that these difficulties have for some time been present to the mind of Mr. E. B. Tylor (one may drop academic titles in speaking of so celebrated a scholar). When Mr. Tylor publishes the Gifford Lectures which he delivered some years ago at Aberdeen, we shall know his mature mind about this problem. Meanwhile he has shown that the difficulty, the god where nae god should be, is haunting his reflections. For example, his latest edition of his Primitive Culture (1891) contains, as we shall show, interesting modifications of what he wrote in the second edition (1873).

There are three ways in which friends of the current theory may attempt to escape from their quandary. (1) The low races with the high gods are degenerate, and their deity is a survival from a loftier stage of lost culture. Mr. Tylor, however, of course, knows too much to regard the Australians, in the Stone age, as degenerate. (2) The evidence is bad, or (Fr. Müller) is that of prejudiced missionaries. But Mr. Tylor knows that some of the evidence is excellent, and, at its best, does not repose on missionary testimony. (3) The high gods of the low races are borrowed from missionary teaching. This is the line adopted by Mr. Tylor.

I have recently pointed out, in The Making of Religion, the many difficulties which beset the current theory. I was therefore alarmed on finding, lately, that Mr. Tylor had mined the soil under my own hypothesis. His Theory of Borrowing (which would blow mine sky-high if it exploded) is expounded by Mr. Tylor in an essay, 'The Limits of Savage Religion,' published in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute (vol. xxi. 1892). I propose to examine Mr. Tylor's work, and to show that Mr. Tylor's own witnesses demonstrate the unborrowed and original character of the gods in question.

Mr. Tylor first opposes the loose popular notion that all over North America the Indians believed in a being named Kitchi Manitou or Great Spirit:' a notion which I do not defend. He says, 'The historical evidence is that the Great Spirit belongs, not to the untutored, but to the tutored mind of the savage, and is preserved for us in the records of the tutors themselves, the Jesuit missionaries of Canada.' Now as to the word 'Manitou,' spirit, Mr. Tylor quotes Le Jeune (1633): By this word "Manitou," I think they understand what we call an angel, or some powerful being.'' Again, 'The Montagnets give the name "Manitou" to everything, whether good or bad, superior to man. Therefore, when we speak of God, they sometimes call Him "The Good Manitou," while when we speak of the Devil, they call him "The Bad Manitou." When then, in 1724, Père Lafitau dilates on The Great Spirit,' The Great Manitou,' we are to see that in ninety years the term which the Indians used for our God-their translation of le bon dieu-has taken root, become acclimatised, and flourished. Lafitau, according to Mr. Tylor, has also raised the Huron word for spirit, oki, to Okki, with a capital O, which he calls Le Grand Esprit. The elevation is solely due to Lafitau and other Christian teachers. If all this were granted, all this is far indeed from proving that the idea of a beneficent Creator was borrowed by the Indians from the Jesuits between 1633 and 1724. Mr. Tylor's own book, Primitive Culture (ii. 342), enables us to correct that opinion. Here he quotes Captain Smith, from an edition of History of Virginia of 1632. Smith began to colonise Virginia in

6

* Le Jeune, Relations, 1633, p. 17. Ibid. 1637, p. 49.

6

1607. He says (edition of 1632): Their chief god they worship is the Devil. Him they call Okee (Okki) and serve him more of fear than love.' Mr. Tylor cites this as a statement by 'a half-educated and whole-prejudiced European' about 'savage deities, which, from his point of view, seem of a wholly diabolic nature.' 'The word Oki,❜ Mr. Tylor goes on, apparently means "that which is above," and was in fact a general name for spirit or deity.' 4

The chief deity of the Virginians, then (in 1607, before missionaries came), with his temples and images, was a being whose name apparently meant that which is above.'

Consequently Lafitau did not, in 1724, first make oki, a spirit, into Okki, a god. That had been done in Virginia before any missionaries arrived, by the natives themselves, long before 1607. For this we have, and Mr. Tylor has cited, the evidence of Smith, before Jesuits arrived. What is yet more to the purpose, William Strachey, a companion of Smith, writing in 1612, tells us that Okeus (as he spells the word) was only a magisterial deputy of 'the great God (the priests tell them) who governs all the world, and makes the sun to shine, creatyng the sun and moone his companions. . . [him] they call Ahone. The good and peaceable God requires no such duties [as are paid to Okeus], nor needs to be sacrificed to, for he intendeth all good unto them.' He has no image. Strachey remarks that the native priests vigorously resisted Christianity. They certainly borrowed neither Okeus, nor Ahone, the beneficent Creator who is without sacrifice, from Jesuits who had not yet arrived.

Do we need more evidence? If so, here it is. Speaking of New England, in 1622, Winslow writes about the god Kiehtan, as a being of ancient credit among the natives. He 'made all the other gods; he dwells far westerly above the heavens, whither all good men go when they die.' Thus Mr. Tylor himself (loc. cit.) summarises Winslow, and quotes, They never saw Kiehtan, but they hold it a great charge and dutie that one age teach another. And to him they make feasts, and cry and sing for plentie, and victorie, or anything is good.' Thus Kiehtan, in 1622, was not only a relatively supreme god, but also a god of ancient standing. Borrowing from missionaries was therefore impossible.

Mr. Tylor then added, in 1873: Brinton's etymology is plausible, that this Kiehtan is simply The Great Spirit (Kittanitowit, Great Living Spirit, an Algonquin word compounded of Kitta=great; manitou=spirit; termination, wit: indicating life).'

But all this etymology Mr. Tylor omitted in his edition of

1891.

4 Prim. Cult. ii. 343.

5 Historie of Travaile into Virginia. By William Strachey, Gent. [a companion of Captain Smith]. Hakluyt Society. Date circ. 1612-1616.