and genealogical. The first were objective and natural, the second subjective and historical. The Indo-European mythologies are simply the interpretation of nature by the imagination, acting spontaneously. They became unintelligible to a later age, because the later lost the mind of the earlier, the eyes with which it looked on nature and read into it a meaning too simple to be seen by self-conscious and inquiring men. The notion that they must have been concealed science, or disguised philosophy, or distorted traditions, or misunderstood history, was the result of a reflective trying to interpret through itself a spontaneous age and faith. But the interpretations, though often both violent and ingenious, could find no sense or reason in the old mythologies, could not, because seeking what did not exist. had arisen without purpose or design, even, it might be said, without thought. They were creations of the imagination clothed in forms supplied by the senses and the memory. To it heaven and earth were alive; the words that denoted natural denoted living objects. There was no death. The dread thing so named was by its very name realized and vivified. Nature and man so interpenetrated that it lived in his life, supplied his fancy with forms it personalized, real then, though grotesque now, and radiant with a light the cultured imagination of to-day can never restore. The universe pulsed with multitudinous life; what was in man was in They : it in it, therefore in him. The forest was musical with living voices, the midnight heaven alive with listening stars, the pale-faced moon full of weird influences, and the glorious sun as it broke from the bosom of the dawn a glad presence scattering the darkness that terrified. And when these fancies were thrown into speech the speech formed a mythology, a veracious reflection of mind in a period of beautiful yet creative simplicity, a dark enigma to mind perplexed with a thousand problems, seeking in the ancient beliefs a wisdom higher than its own. But the Semitic mythologies had an essentially different character. It is necessary, indeed, to be here cautious. Certain myths hitherto believed to be distinctively Semitic are being traced to Turanian sources. But this only allows us to be more definite and precise, to perceive what are really the essential features of the Semitic mythologies. They were theological and historical. They are not imaginative interpretations of nature. Their nature is dead, owes its being, life, and energy to the gods. They are eminently cosmogonic, concerned with the beginnings of things as the oldest Indo-European myths never are. And as they are, on the one side, theological, they are, on the other, historical. As the Semitic conceived the person to be the great force in nature, he also conceived him to be the great force in history. The living present ever seemed to him made by the men of the immemorial past. He was greater, indeed, in memory than imagination, and so became the genealogist of the world, marking time and making nations by patriarchs. His mythologies were thus intensely subjective and personal, cosmogonies on the one side, genealogies on the other, persons being to him supreme alike in nature and history. Mythology is nascent literature, spontaneous poetry. And poetry is the form the first conscious literature everywhere assumes. Here, then, the poetries of our two families ought to have been exhibited as mirrors of the racial mind. But the subject is too vast to be here handled. Enough to say, the poetry of the one family has been imaginative, objective, representing the infinite variety of elements in nature and man, but that of the other has been emotional, subjective, expressing devotion or passion, love or hate, as God or man, friend or foe, was addressed. Indo-European poetry has grown with the race, has claimed whatever was man's as matter it could make its own, has widened with mind, deepened with thought, become varied and complex as experience has multiplied the material it could idealize and represent. It has been sensitive to every shadow that has fallen upon the spirit, to every change in the relations of mind to nature and man. In ages of action, when men loved the heroic and the chivalrous, it has been full of adventure and enterprise, oblivious of the thinker's questions, alive to the glory of strength and courage and warlike achievement. In times of ease and luxury, it has known how to indulge the heart, how to idealize the lust of the eye and the pride of life. In seasons when patriotism has sublimed, or faith transfigured, or doubt perplexed, or discovery widened and enlarged the spirit, its poetry has responded to its mood. Eschylos may weave into his tragedies the ancient legends of his people, but he informs them with a new spirit and meaning, makes them speak of a moral order, an inflexible law, which inspires with a strength and touches with a terror the men of the Homeric age never knew. Sophokles may find the material of his dramas in the stories current among his countrymen, but he makes them the vehicles of his own thoughts, expressive of a new and more perfect idea of man, the consciousness of the ethical worth and significance of life which marked the age when philosophy turned from speculating about nature to inquire at man. Shakespere may find in history or old romance the material of his plays, but he makes his matter the home of a universal spirit, inspires it with a meaning that enables men ever after to feel more deeply the immensity and the mystery of life. And ever has Indo-European poetry been as progressive as Indo-European mind, most objective when it seemed most subjective. The subject has been but a conscious object, mind aware of self as a mirror of the universe, the one as an eye that reflected the all. The Divina Commedia represents the faith not of a man, but of an age; "the thought it lived by stands here, in everlasting music." Faust is not Goethe, but the universal student, athirst for knowledge, in search of truth, mocked by the empty forms that hide while they profess to reveal it. Wordsworth's was a universal subjectivity, the modern spirit aiming at the higher and more conscious imaginative interpretation of nature. As thought has increased in mass, variety, and complexity, imagination has developed the energy that could poetically represent and present it. "Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie," says Pascal, contemplating a starlight night; but out of the terror caused by the deepening sense of the infinite space and time lying round our little conscious moment, there has ever come the material the creative phantasy could shape to its own high ends, making its creations as varied and manifold as the universe they reflect. But Semitic poetry has not been rich and progressive, but intense and exalted, subjective and passionate. It has been sensuous rather than imaginative, the symbol of strong emotions rather than the vehicle of creative thought. It has represented with unequalled power the intensities of love and hate, the feeling of a man in the ecstasy of admiration or aversion. It has prayed to and praised God, has blessed and cursed man as no other poetry has done. It is seldom ideal, almost always real and personal. The very strength of the Hebrew Psalms is the intensity of the personal element. The subjective state is objectified and realized 2 A |