" "A through all ages and in all countries, must be given up as a false theory 1." fable that is probable," says Bacon, may be thought to have been composed merely for pleasure, in imitation of history. But when a story is told which could never have entered into any man's head, either to conceive or relate on its own account, we must presume that it had some further reach. What a fiction (for instance) is that of Jupiter and Metis! Jupiter took Metis to wife; as soon as he saw that she was with child, he ate her up: whereupon he grew to be with child himself, and so brought forth out of his head Pallas in armour! Surely I think no man had ever a dream so monstrous, and extravagant, and out of all natural ways of thinking 2." Both agree likewise in concluding that the original story must have involved another meaning; that the names and incidents must have survived after that meaning had been forgotten; and that they have suffered in the hands of poets a variety of alterations, applications, and corruptions. So far the two speculations go together; but at this point they part, and part in opposite directions. Bacon, having only the Greek language and mythology to interpret the Greek fables by, conceived it possible that a generation of wise men had once flourished upon the earth who taught the mysteries of nature in parables; that they died and their wisdom with them; the parables remaining in memory, merely as tales without meaning. Professor Müller, furnished with materials for a wider induction in the languages and mythologies of all the Eastern nations and races, and finding similar traditions flourishing among them all,-" stories identical in form and in character, whether we find them on Indian, Persian, Greek, Italian, Slavonic, or Teutonic soil," and being able likewise to trace the names which figure in many of these stories through their Greek corruptions to their original meaning in the language from which they came,-able, for instance, by help of the Veda to identify Daphne with the Dawn (see p. 57)-is led, through a course of reasoning too long for quotation and yet too close for abridgement, to a conclusion much more in accordance with all we know of the progress and vicissitudes of human things; yet one which, if accepted, will be held, I think, to justify me in treating the ideas which Bacon finds in these fables as valuable only for the truth and sense they contain, and not as illustrating antiquity. He traces the origin of these mythes to a time when abstract nouns had not been invented; when men had not learnt to express by single words collective or abstract ideas; when therefore everything was spoken of as a person, with a name and a sex. conceives that they were in fact merely descriptions of the great phenomena of nature; conveying to those who first uttered them the ideas of morning and evening, summer and winter, dawn, twilight, darkness, etc.; indicating the relations between them by words expressing human relations, human feelings and passions; and thus making every metaphor a story; which, passing into another language in which the original name no longer suggested the original image, lost its metaphorical signification, came to be received and repeated as a story simply, and so grew into what we call a Mythe. It would not be difficult to suggest analogies even from our own experience, by which it would be seen that the process is a natural one; but I should do injustice to Professor Müller's argument if I attempted to give an idea of the evidence which he brings to support his view. I have said enough, however, to enable the reader to enter into his exposition of the fable of Endymion, which will sufficiently illustrate his theory; and which, as we have Bacon's exposition to contrast it with, will serve better than anything else to exhibit the difference between the rival methods of interpretation. He "We can best enter," says he, "into the original meaning of a Greek mythe, when some of the persons who act in it have preserved names intelligible in Greek. When we find the names of Eos, Selene, Helios, or Herse, we have words which tell their own story, and we have a Toû or for the rest of the mythe. Let us take the beautiful mythe of Selene and Endymion. Endymion is the son of Zeus and Kalyke, but he is also the son of Aethlios, a king of Elis, who is himself called a son of Zeus, and whom Endymion is said to have succeeded as King of Elis. This localises our mythe, and shows, at least, that Elis is its birth place, and that, B.W. 1 Essay on Comparative Mythology, pp. 3, 11. 2 De Sap. Vet. Præfatio, p. 816 of this volume. 3 G according to Greek custom, the reigning race of Elis derived its origin from Zeus. The same custom prevailed in India, and gave rise to the two great royal families of ancient India-the so-called Solar and the Lunar races; and Purûravas, of whom more by and by, says of himself,— The great king of day, And monarch of the night are my progenitors; Their grandson I . . . There may, then, have been a King of Elis, Aethlios, and he may have had a son, Endymion; but what the mythe tells of Endymion could not have happened to the King of Elis. The mythe transfers Endymion into Karia, to Mount Latmos, because it was in the Latmian cave that Selene saw the beautiful sleeper, loved him and lost him. Now about the meaning of Selene, there can be no doubt; but even if tradition had only preserved her other name, Asterodia, we should have had to translate this synonyme, as Moon, as ' Wanderer among the stars.' But who is Endymion? It is one of the many names of the sun, but with special reference to the setting or dying sun. It is derived from ev-dów, a verb which, in classical Greek, is never used for setting, because the simple verb duw had become the technical term for sunset. Avoμai λiov, the setting of the Sun, is opposed to ȧvaróλa, the rising. Now, dúw meant, originally, to dive into; and expressions like ἡέλιος δ ̓ ἄρ ̓ ἔδυ, the sun dived, presupposes an earlier conception of ἔδυ TÓνTOV, he dived into the sea. Thus Thetis addresses her companions, Il. xviii. 140. Ὑμεῖς μὲν νῦν δῦτε αλάσσης εὑρέα κόλπον, You may now dive into the broad bosom of the sea. Other dialects, particularly of maritime nations, have the same expression. In Lat. we find 'Cur mergat seras æquore flammas'. In Old Norse, Sôl gengr i aegi'. Slavonic nations represent the sun as a woman stepping into her bath in the evening, and rising refreshed and purified in the morning; or they speak of the Sea as the mother of the Sun, and of the Sun as sinking into her mother's arms at night. We may suppose, therefore, that in some Greek dialect evouw was used in the same sense; and that from évdów, évdúpa was formed to express sunset. From this was formed ἐνδυμίων, like οὐρανίων from οὐρανός, and like most of the names of the Greek months. If évdúua had become a common name for sunset, the mythe of Endymion could have never arisen. But the original meaning of Endymion being once forgotten, what was told originally of the setting sun was now told of a name, which, in order to have any meaning, had to be changed into a god or a hero. The setting sun once slept in the Latnian cave, or cave of night, Latmos being derived from the same root as Leto, I.atona, the night,but now he sleeps on Mount Latmos, in Karia. Endymion, sinking into eternal sleep after a life of but one day, was once the setting sun, the son of Zeus, the brilliant Sky, and Kalyke, the covering night (from KaλúπTw); or, according to another saying, of Zeus and Protogeneia, the first-born goddess, or the Dawn, who is always represented either as the mother, the sister, or the forsaken wife of the Sun. Now he is the son of a King of Elis, probably for no other reason except that it was usual for kings to take names of good omen, connected with the sun, or the moon, or the stars,--in which case a mythe, connected with a solar name, would naturally be transferred to its human namesake. In the ancient poetical and proverbial language of Elis, people said 'Selene loves and watches Endymion', instead of it is getting late'; 'Selene embraces Endymion', instead of the sun is setting and the moon is rising'; 'Selene kisses Endymion into sleep,' instead of 'it is night'. These expressions remained long after their meaning had ceased to be understood; and as the human mind is generally as anxious for a reason as ready to invent one, a story arose by common consent, and without any personal effort, that Endymion must have been a young lad loved by a young lady, Selene; and if children were anxious to know still more, there would always be a grandmother happy to tell them that this young Endymion was the son of the Protogeneia,--she half meaning and half not meaning by that name the Dawn, who gave birth to the sun; or of Kalyke, the dark and covering night. This name, once touched, would set many chords vibrating; three or four different reasons might be given (as they really were given by ancient poets) why Endymion fell into this everlasting sleep, and if any of these was alluded to by a popular poet, it became a mythological fact, repeated by later poets; so that Endymion grew at last almost into a type, no longer of the setting sun, but of a handsome boy beloved of a chaste maiden, and therefore a most likely name for a young prince. Many mythes have thus been transferred to real persons, by a mere similarity of name, though it must be admitted that there is no historical evidence whatever that there ever was a Prince of Elis, called by the name of Endymion. "Such is the growth of a legend, originally a mere word, a uveos, probably one of those many words which have but a local currency, and lose their value if they are taken to distant places,-words useless for the daily intercourse of thought,-spurious coins in the hands of the many,--yet not thrown away, but preserved as curiosities and ornaments, and deciphered at last, after many centuries, by the antiquarian 3." I give this specimen merely to explain and illustrate the modern theory. For the argument in support of it I must refer to the Essay itself; though even there it suffers much for want of room. But that the process described is possible and natural, may be shewn meanwhile without going out of our own literature or our own times. The poetry of earth is never dead : and even within the last ten years an instance has occurred of the simple language of poetic passion being translated out of poetry into mythology. Alfred Tennyson speaks in In Memoriam of returning home in the evening Before the crimson-circled star Had fallen into her father's grave: not thinking at all of any traditional pedigree, (no more than when he speaks of Sad Hesper, o'er the buried Sun, And ready thou to die with him,) but expressing, by such an image, as the ancient Elian might have resorted to, his sympathy with the pathetic aspect of the dying day. Critics however asked for explanations: what star, whose daughter, what grave? And it turns out curiously enough that all these questions can be answered out of Greek mythology quite satisfactorily. "The planet Venus (says a Belgravian correspondent of Notes and Queries, 1851, iii. 506), when she is to the east of the sun, is our evening star (and as such used to be termed Hesperus by the ancients). The evening star in a summer twilight is seen surrounded with the glow of sunset, crimson-circled. ... Venus sinking into the sea, which in setting she would appear to do, falls into the grave of Uranus,-her father according to the theory of Hesiod (190). The part cast into the sea from which Aphrodite sprung, is here taken by a becoming licence (which softens the grossness of the old tradition) for the whole; so that the ocean, beneath the horizon of which the evening star sinks, may be well described by the poet as her father's grave '." I would not indeed have any one remember this explanation when he is reading the poem, for it is fatal to the poetic effect; but the coincidence of the expression with the mythic tradition is curious; and might almost make one think that Tennyson, while merely following the eternal and universal instincts of the human imagination and feeling, had unconsciously reproduced the very image out of which the tradition originally grew. In Dr. Rawley's list of works composed by Bacon during the last five years of his life, he mentions "his revising of his book De Sapientia Veterum". And as he professes to give them in the order in which they were written, and this comes 3 Oxford Essays, 1856, p. 49. near the end, I suppose he does not allude merely to the three fables introduced into the second book of the De Augmentis, which was published in 1623; but to some further revision of the whole previous to the reprinting of the work among the Opera Moralia et Civilia. I have therefore treated that posthumous edition (which varies in a few, though very few, passages from the original of 1609), as the latest authority for the text. But as it is not so carefully printed as the other I have collated the two throughout, and noticed the variations. I have also kept the title-page of the original edition; and I have followed modern editors in making the interpretation of each fable commence a new paragraph. [NOTE. Since Spedding wrote, the science of Mythology has been carried further than the stage reached in the early essay of Max Müller, which, moreover, did not take account of sound principles established by K. O. Müller, and other preceding writers. It may suffice here to say that the etymological principle, brought to bear on the phenomena of nature, is quite insufficient to explain the mass of myths, though it is valid in a number of cases. Etymology itself has been greatly perfected through a completer checking of deduction by induction; and mythology has latterly been much advanced by the same discipline. Bacon, failing to apply to it his own most frequently iterated rules of investigation, gives purely à priori solutions, which are in all cases wholly removed from scientific truth. Later students, in the usual way of scientific advance, have resorted more and more to analysis, comparison and induction; and it may be that the induction is still far from complete. To the etymological and meteorological keys must be added others, including that of the derivation of many Greek myths from fanciful interpretations of works of art, often originally Eastern astronomical symbols. But the whole inquiry must have regard to the psychology of savages, the bulk of mythology being a derivation from primitive life and thought. To the anthropological or psychological study of myth the best modern guides are Tylor, Mannhardt, Frazer, Spencer, Vignoli, Grant Allen, Lang, and the later works of Max Müller, whose earlier method, further, was ably developed by Sir George Cox.-Ed.] AUTHOR'S DEDICATION. TO THE MOST ILLUSTRIOUS THE EARL OF SALISBURY DGE. AND CHANCELLOR OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE THINGS dedicated to the University of Cambridge accrue to you as Chancellor ; to all that proceeds from me you have a personal title. The question is, whether as these things are yours, so they are worthy of you. Now for that which is least worth in them (the wit of the author), your kindness towards me will let that pass; and there is nothing else in the matter to disgrace you. For if time be regarded, primæval antiquity is an object of the highest veneration; if the form of exposition,-parable has ever been a kind of arc, in which the most precious portions of the sciences were deposited; if the matter of the work,-it is philosophy, the second grace and ornament of life and the human soul. For be it said, that however philosophy in this our age, falling as it were into a second childhood, be left to young men and almost to boys, yet I hold it to be of all things, next to religion, the most important and most worthy of human nature. Even the art of politics, wherein you are so well approved both by faculty and by merits, and by the judgment of a most wise king, springs from the same fountain, and is a great part thereof. And if any man think these things of mine to be common and vulgar, it is not for me of course to say what I have effected; but my aim has been, passing by things obvious and obsolete and commonplace, to give some help towards the difficulties of life and the secrets of science. To the vulgar apprehension therefore they will be vulgar; but it may be that the deeper intellect will not be left aground by them, but rather (as I hope) carried along. While however I strive to attach some worth to this work, because it is dedicated to you, I am in danger of transgressing the bounds of modesty, seeing it is undertaken by myself. But you will accept it as a pledge of my affection, observance, and devotion to yourself, and will accord it the protection of your name. Seeing therefore that you have so many and so great affairs on your shoulders, I will not take up more of your time, but make an end, wishing you all felicity, and ever remaining yours, Most bounden to you both by my zeal and your benefits, FRA. BACON. TO HIS NURSING-MOTHER THE FAMOUS UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE. SINCE without philosophy I care not to live, I must needs hold you in great honour, from whom these defences and solaces of life have come to me. To you on this account I profess to owe both myself and all that is mine; and therefore it is the less strange, if I requite you with what is your own; that with a natural motion it may return to the place whence it came. And, yet I know not how it is, but there are few footprints pointing back towards you, among the infinite number that have gone forth from you. Nor shall I take too much to myself (I think), if by reason of that little acquaintance with affairs which my kind and plan of life has necessarily carried with it, I indulge a hope that the inventions of the learned may receive some accession by these labours of mine. Certainly I am of opinion that speculative studies when transplanted into active life acquire some new grace and vigour, and having more matter to feed them, strike their roots perhaps deeper, or at least grow taller and fuller leaved. Nor do you yourselves (as I think) know how widely your own studies extend, and how many things they concern. Yet it is fit that all should be attributed to you and be counted to your honour, since all increase is due in great part to the beginning. You will not however expect from a man of business anything exquisite; any miracles or prerogatives of leisure; but you will attribute to my great love for you and yours even this,-that among the thorns of business these things have not quite perished, but there is preserved for you so much of your own. Your most loving pupil, FRA. BACON. |