An age of awakening criticism begins to find the legend doubtful—cannot entirely believe, cannot entirely dismiss the old familiar story,—begins to interpret it as allegory, or to separate the probable incidents from the improbable, receiving the first, rejecting the second. A new rule of faith has been introduced; not what is most captivating and strange, but what best harmonises with the common occurrences of life, is to be the most readily believed. The exuberant legend is therefore pruned down and mutilated, or it is represented as the fantastic shadow of some quite natural circumstance,—strange shadow for such substance!—and in this state it is admitted to a certain credence. But who sees not that this is no separation of history from fable, but merely a reduction of the fable into something we can pronounce to be probable? But the probability of this residue is no sufficient ground for our belief; no one, surely, supposes that imagination deals in nothing but impossibilities. The utmost effort, the wildest flight of fancy, could not always keep clear of probability; and it would be strange indeed if the romantic fiction could claim our faith at every point where, by chance, it had touched the earth. One might as well sift, in the same manner, a fiction of the Arabian Nights; and, setting aside the supernatural, admit whatever is natural to be true. The wonderful properties of Aladdin's lamp shall be given up; but that Aladdin had an old lamp, and that his wife sold it when he was out of the way, this shall remain admissible.
A third age, however, arrives, still more critical, more justly and profoundly analytic. It recognises that, by the process just described, a dead residuum of little value and doubtful reality is the utmost that can be obtained, While the real value of the subject of this untutored chemistry has been lost in the experiment. It returns to the legend—contemplates it in its entire, and genuine form. It sees that the legend is the true history of the minds that created and believed it—a very important history—but of little or nothing else. Seen in this light, there is, indeed, no comparison between the value of the poetic fable as a contribution to the history of mankind, and the value of the prosaic and ordinary fact which a half critical age (if sure of its guess) would extract from it. Think for a moment of all the marvels of the Argonautic expedition; that vessel, itself sentient and intelligent, having its prophet as well as pilot on board, darting through rocks which move and join together, like huge pincers, to crush the passing ship; think of the wondrous Medea who conducted the homeward voyage, and reflect upon the sort of people who created and credited all these marvels. Then turn to the semi-critical version of Strabo, where the whole expedition resolves itself into an invasion of some unknown king, of some unknown country, whose wealth stands typified in the golden fleece. Such writers as Strabo commit a two-fold error. They corrupt history, and they destroy the legend. They write an unauthorised narrative, and explain the nature and genius of the fable in a manner equally unauthorised.
Or take an instance still more familiar. The legend tells us that Romulus—as was thought befitting the founder of Rome—died in no ordinary manner, but was translated to the skies. He had called the people together on the field of Mars, "when," in the simple language which Dr Arnold has appropriated to these legendary stories—"when all on a sudden there arose a dreadful storm, and all was dark as night; and the rain, and the thunder, and the lightning, were so terrible that all the people fled from the field, and ran to their homes. At last the storm was over, and they came back to the field of Mars, but Romulus was nowhere to be found, for Mars, his father, had carried him up to heaven in his chariot." Dionysius the Greek found, in this mysterious disappearance, a proof of the assassination of Romulus by certain of his nobles, who stabbed him and conveyed him away in the thunder-storm. And our own Hooke thought himself equally sagacious, in his day, when he adopted this interpretation. But what is it that we have here? Not history certainly; and as little an intelligent view of the fable.
What Hooke did, in his day, occasionally, and in an empirical manner, some German literati have attempted in a quite systematic, a priori fashion. They first determine that the myth or legend has been composed by a certain play of the imagination—as the representing the history of a people, or a tribe, under the personal adventures of an imaginary being; and then they hope to unravel this work of the fancy, and get back again the raw material of plain truth. If they are partially correct in describing this to have been one course the imagination pursued—which is all that can be admitted—still the attempt is utterly hopeless to recover, in its first shape, what has been confessedly disguised and distorted. The naturalists of Laputa were justified in supposing that the light of the sun had much to do with the growth of gerkins, but it does not follow that they would succeed in their project of "extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers."
For the briefest illustration we can call to mind of this philosophical ingenuity, we will refer the reader to Michelet's preface to his History of Rome. We see the absurdity none the worse for it being presented through the transparent medium of the French writer. He thus explains the discovery of the learned Germans whom he follows:—"Ce qu'il y a de plus original, c'est d'avoir prouvé que ces fictions historiques étaient une necéssité de notre nature. L'humanité d'abord matérielle et grossière, ne pouvait dans les langues encore toutes concrètes, exprimer la pensée abstraite, qu'en la réalisant, en lui donnant un corps, une personalité humaine, un nom propre. Le même besoin do simplification, si naturel à la faiblesse, fit aussi désigner une collection d'individus par un nom d'homme. Cet homme mythique, ce fils de la pensée populaire, exprima à la fois le peuple et l'idée du peuple. Romulus c'était la force, et le peuple de la force; Juda, l'élection divine et le peuple élu."
Having thus expounded the theory of the construction of a myth, he afterwards tries his hand upon the resolution of one into its constituent elements. The fourth chapter of his introduction commences thus:—"Circé, dit Hésiode, (Theog. v. 1111, 1115) eut d'Ulysse deux fils, Latinos et Agrios (le barbare,) qui au fond des saintes îles gouvenèrent la race célèbre des Tyrséniens. J'enterprèterais volontiers ce passage de la manière suivante: Des Pelasges, navigateurs et magiciens, (c'est-à-dire, industrieux) sortirent les deux grandes sociétés Italiennes—les Osci, (dont les Latins sont une tribu,) et les Tusci ou Etrusques. Circé, fille du soleil, a tous les caractères d'une Telchine Pélasgique. Le poete nous la montre près d'un grand feu, rarement utile dans un pays chaud, si ce n'est pour un but industriel; elle file la toile, ou prépare de puissants breuvages."
The theory and the application, it will be seen, are worthy of each other. All comment would be superfluous. We have preferred to retain the original language for this, amongst other reasons, that we should have found it difficult to represent in honest English the exact degree of affirmation to which the Frenchman pledges himself by his "j'enterpreterais volontiers." It is something less than conviction, and something more than guess;—it certainly should be, or it ought to have no place in history.