LITERARY NOTICES. 



773 



Myths and Myth-Makers: Old Tales and 

 Superstitions interpreted by Compara- 

 tive Mythology. By John Fiske. Price, 

 $2.00. Boston : James R. Osgood & Co., 

 1873. 



Travellers to the United States, and 

 American authors themselves, have often 

 remarked on the affectionate veneration 

 shown by Americans for the oldest things 

 in Europe, and for all the associations con- 

 necting their present life with the life of 

 their forefathers in the old country. Not 

 long ago, it may be remembered, the build- 

 ers of a new meeting-house at Boston 

 (United States), sent for a brick from the 

 prototype still standing at our Boston in 

 England. We now find an officer of Har- 

 vard University putting forth labor which 

 is evidently a labor of love, and the literary 

 skill and taste in which the best American 

 writers set an example worth commending 

 to many of ours ; and the things he speaks 

 of belong to the Old World ; to a world, 

 indeed, so far off that for centuries we had 

 lost its meaning, and have only just learned 

 to spell it out again. His theme takes 

 him back from the New World, not only to 

 England, not only to Europe, but to the 

 ancient home of the Aryan race, a world 

 still full of wonders for the dwellers in it, 

 whose changes of days and seasons, inter- 

 preted by the analogy of human will and 

 action, were instinct with manifold life ; 

 where the imagination of our fathers shaped 

 the splendid and gracious forms which have 

 gone forth over the earth, as their children 

 went forth, and prevailed in many lands, 

 and have lived on through all the diverse 

 fates of the kindred peoples in India, in 

 Greece, in Iceland, to bear witness in the 

 latter days to the unity of the parent stock. 

 This book, which Mr. Fiske modestly intro- 

 duces as a " somewhat rambling and unsys- 

 tematic series of papers," seems to us to 

 give the leading results of comparative my- 

 thology in a happier manner and with 

 greater success than has yet been attained 

 in so small a compass. It is the work of 

 a student who follows in the steps of the 

 great leaders with right-minded apprecia- 

 tion, and who, though he does not make 

 any claim to originality, is no ordinary 

 compiler. He is enthusiastic in his pursuit, 

 without being a fanatic ; his style has the 



attractiveness, due to a certain subtle tact 

 or refinement hard to analyze, but quite 

 sensibly felt, which marks the best Ameri- 

 can essay-writing ; and his manner of deal- 

 ing with his subject is well fitted to reassure 

 those who have been deterred from seeking 

 any acquaintance with comparative my- 

 thology, either by the formidable appearance 

 of philological apparatus and Vedic proper 

 names, or by the aggressive boldness of 

 one or two champions of the new learning. 

 It is very natural to feel a rebellious impulse 

 at being told that half the gods and heroes 

 of the classical epics, or even the nursery 

 tales, which have delighted us from our 

 youth up, are sun and sky, light and dark- 

 ness, summer and winter, in various dis- 

 guises. 



The myth is in its origin neither an al- 

 legory as Bacon and many others have 

 thought nor a metaphor as seems now 

 and then to be implied in the language of 

 modern comparative mythologists but a 

 genuinely-accepted explanation of facts, a 

 " theorem of primitive Aryan science," as 

 Mr. Fiske happily expresses it. This view 

 is brought out in the last essay of the vol- 

 ume, entitled " The Primeval Ghost World," 

 where the genesis of mythology is held not 

 to be explicable by the science of language 

 alone, and is rather ascribed to the complete 

 absence of distinction between animate and 

 inanimate Nature, which is now known to 

 be common to all tribes of men in a primi- 

 tive condition, and to which Mr. Tylor has 

 given the name of Animism. We are 

 pleased to find Mr. Fiske praising Mr. Ty- 

 lor's work warmly, and even enthusiasti- 

 cally : here is another of the many proofs 

 that the ties of common language and cult- 

 ure are in the long-run stronger than diplo- 

 macy and Indirect Claims. We find men- 

 tioned, among other instances of animism, 

 the belief that a man's shadow is a sort of 

 ghost or other self. This belief has, in 

 comparatively-recent times, made its mark 

 even in so civilized a tongue as the Greek. 

 ^roixeib in Romaic is a ghost, or rather a 

 personified object generally, and seems to 

 correspond exactly to the other self attrib- 

 uted by primitive man to all creatures, liv- 

 ing or not living, indiscriminately. Mr. 

 Geldart, in a note to his book on Modern 

 Greek (Oxford, 1870), which well deserves 



