Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, August 1847. Various
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.
It is not by mangling the legend, or by predicating of it fantastic modes of construction, that the few grains of sober fact concealed about it are to be secured; but by studying honestly the laws of imagination under which all fabulous narratives are constructed. However wildly the fancy may range in the main events of a fable, there will be always a certain portion of the details gathered from real life; and the manners and morals of an age may be depicted in fictions, the substance of which is altogether supernatural. The heroes fight like gods, but they dine and dress like ordinary mortals. Achilles drags the body of Hector three times round the walls of Troy, both armies looking on the while. Such sight the earth never beheld. But the ear of the warrior and the harness of his steeds resembled such as had been seen or heard of. The poet invents a centaur, but not the bow and arrow he puts into his hands. His hero scales the sky, but carries with him the sandal on his foot which was made in the village below.
"Three-fourths of the two volumes now presented to the public," continues Mr Grote in his preface, "are destined to elucidate this age of historical faith as distinguished from the later age of historical reason: to exhibit its basis in the human mind—an omnipresent religious and personal interpretation of nature; to illustrate it by comparison with the like mental habit in early modern Europe; to show its immense abundance and variety of narrative matter, with little care for consistency between one story and another; lastly, to set forth the causes which overgrew, and partially supplanted the old epical sentiment, and introduced, in the room of literal faith, a variety of compromises and interpretations." This is the just application of the legends of Greece, forming, as they do, the very best description of the people whose exploits and career the author is about to narrate. This is a truer commencement of the history than that which appears at first sight more strictly historical—namely, an investigation into the obscure tribes which inhabited the same country prior to that people who are known to us as Greeks—an investigation that is to be carried on by strained interpretations of these very legends. We congratulate both author and reader on this escape from the fruitless entanglement of the Pelasgian controversy. Mr Grote seems to have taken due warning from the difficulties and embarrassments in which his predecessor has here involved himself. Dr Thirlwall is a judicious, a succinct, and lucid writer, and yet a more tedious, confused, and utterly unsatisfactory piece of history no man can read than the account he gives us, in his opening volume, of the Pelasgians. The subject is clearly hopeless. From the first sentence to the last of that account, a painful confusion attends upon the reader—not the fault, we are ready to believe, of the historian, unless it be a fault to attempt a statement of facts where the materials for such a statement do not exist. "The people"—Dr Thirlwall thus commences—"whom we call Greeks—the Hellenes—were not, at least under this name, the first inhabitants of Greece. Many names have been recorded of races that preceded them there, which they in later times considered barbarous, or foreign in language and manners to themselves." Here the very first sentence proclaims a doubt how far the change was one of race or only of name, and this doubt pursues us throughout the whole inquiry. It is never solved by the author, but is sometimes forgotten by him; for he occasionally proceeds with the discussion as if he had left no such doubt behind him undetermined. At one time he states distinctly, "we find that though in early times Thessaly, and the north of Greece in general, was the scene of frequent migrations and revolutions so that its ancient inhabitants may here and there have been completely displaced by new tribes, Attica appears never to have undergone such a change; and Peloponnesus