Myths and Myth-Makers: Old Tales and Superstitions interpreted by Comparative 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 connecting their present life with the life of their forefathers in the old country. Not long ago, it may be remembered, the builders 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 Harvard 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, interpreted 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 introduces as a "somewhat rambling and unsystematic series of papers," seems to us to give the leading results of comparative mythology 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 appreciation, 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 American essay-writing; and his manner of dealing with his subject is well fitted to reassure those who have been deterred from seeking any acquaintance with comparative mythology, 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 darkness, summer and winter, in various disguises.
The myth is in its origin neither an allegory—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 volume, 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 primitive condition, and to which Mr. Tylor has given the name of Animism. We are pleased to find Mr. Fiske praising Mr. Tylor's work warmly, and even enthusiastically: here is another of the many proofs that the ties of common language and culture are in the long-run stronger than diplomacy and Indirect Claims. We find mentioned, 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. Στοιχεδ in Romaic is a ghost, or rather a personified object generally, and seems to correspond exactly to the other self attributed by primitive man to all creatures, living or not living, indiscriminately. Mr. Geldart, in a note to his book on Modern Greek (Oxford, 1870), which well deserves
