In spite of all drawbacks, however, his book shows an abiding
taste for scholarly pursuits, and therefore deserves a certain
kind of praise. I hope,--though just now the idea savours of
the ludicrous,--that the day may some time arrive when OUR
Congressmen and Secretaries of the Treasury will spend their
vacations in writing books about Greek antiquities, or in
illustrating the meaning of Homeric phrases.
July, 1870.
VII. THE PRIMEVAL GHOST-WORLD.
NO earnest student of human culture can as yet have forgotten
or wholly outlived the feeling of delight awakened by the
first perusal of Max Muller's brilliant "Essay on Comparative
Mythology,"--a work in which the scientific principles of
myth-interpretation, though not newly announced, were at least
brought home to the reader with such an amount of fresh and
striking concrete illustration as they had not before
received. Yet it must have occurred to more than one reader
that, while the analyses of myths contained in this noble
essay are in the main sound in principle and correct in
detail, nevertheless the author's theory of the genesis of
myth is expressed, and most likely conceived, in a way that is
very suggestive of carelessness and fallacy. There are obvious
reasons for doubting whether the existence of mythology can be
due to any "disease," abnormity, or hypertrophy of metaphor in
language; and the criticism at once arises, that with the
myth-makers it was not so much the character of the expression
which originated the thought, as it was the thought which gave
character to the expression.
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