A NEW KEY TO MYTHOLOGY.*

TxrEns is, perhaps, no subject of discussion in which reason plays a less prominent, or guessing a more prominent, part than in the question of the origin of myths. Every generation, and almost every writer on the subject, has a different explanation to offer, each destructive of the last. From the simple faith of Homer to the beginnings of scepticism as to the S poi kiyo: which Herodotus displays, to the allegorising of Plato and the real-man explanation of Euhemerns, -the natural religion of the eighteenth century, on to the etymological theories and the nature-myths of Max Muller, every one is ready with a different but equally invaluable specific for solving all difficulties which may suggest themselves for the origin of fairy-tales. Mr. Andrew Lang is no exception to the rule. He, too, has his theory, which is destructive of all previous theories, and is the

one key that will fit all locks. But it has this advantage over • all the theories that have preceded it—except, perhaps, that of the etymologists—that it is not evolved from the inner consciousness, that it is founded on verce causce, and in actual operation is based on a study of history and etymological facts. Mr. Lang belongs to the historical school. He applies the comparative method to myths and fairy-tales. He is of the school of Mr.

Herbert Spencer, and Mr. Tylor, and Mr. Ralston. His main thesis is that myths and fairy-tales, like everything else, are not only capable of rational explanation, but must be explained on the assumption that the people who invented them are not born lunatics or idiots. Myths and fairy-tales have descended to us from early and more or less savage times ; but we must be careful not to assume that savages were able to make bricks without straw, or to mistake straw for clay, any more t)-an their descendants. In other words, the most grotesque and al., unreasonable incidents must be pronounced to have a re, able origin, and, it may be added, a more solid origin than nie.„ verbal blunders.

The Enhemerists and allegorists are apt to neglect the first presumption ; the mythologists or etymologists the second. The anthropologist, by his researches into ancient and modern folklore and folk-customs, particularly those of barbarous tribes, endeavours to give both a reasonable and a solid origin to many tales or incidents in tales which have hitherto appeared inexplicable absurdities. It is needless to say that Mr. Lang has wrapped up his scientific researches in a literary form, and that his essays on the subject are full of humour as well as interest. A good example of the penetrating power of the com parative method is Mr. Lang's treatment of the tale of Cupid and Psyche. It must have occurred to every one that the trials of Psyche were unreasonably severe to our notions for the mere fault of looking at her husband :—

"In one shape or another the tale of Cupid and Psycho, of the woman who is forbidden to see or name her husband, of the man with the vanished fairy-bride, is known in most lands, even among barbarians.' According to the story, the mystic prohibition is always broken ; the hidden face is beheld, light is brought into the darkness ; the forbidden name is uttered ; the bride is touched with the forbidden metal, iron, and the union is ended. . . . . . In the attempt to discover how the ideas on which this myth is based came into existence, we may choose one of two methods. We may confine our investigations to the Aryan peoples, among whom the story wears both in the form of myth and of household tale (i.e.' do as the mythologists do, simply search the Rig Veda, Homer, and the Nibelungen Lied). Again, we may look for the shapes Of the legend which hide, like Pena d'Aue, in disguise among the rude kraals and wigwams, and in the strange and scanty garb of savages (i.e., adopt the method of the anthropologists). If among savages wo find both narratives like Cupid and Psyche, and also customs and laws out of which the myth might have arisen, we may provisionally conclude that similar customs once existed among the civilised races who possess the tale, and that from these sprang the early forms of the myth."

Mr. Lang, therefore, adopting the latter method, traces the myth not only through the Rig Veda and the Brahmana, where the fairy-bride tells her mortal lover that she is "never to see him without his royal garments, for this is the manner of women ;" but he hunts it down into the Spartan marriage customs, the Breton tale of the Frenchman who married the daughter of the "King of Naz," where "lee marls ne voient pas leurs femmes sans voiles gue lorsqu'elles sont doyennes meres," and variations of the story among the Oijibways and the Zulus. He then illustrates, and at the same time, as he

thinks, explains, its origin by the strange taboos which exist among savage races, as, for instance, the people of Fate, in Africa, where "wives never permit their husbands to see them unveiled for three years after marriage "; or the Iroquois of North America, who" n'osent slier dans lea cabanas particulieres oi habitant lenrs eponses quo durant l'obscurit6 de la nuit "; or the Youabas of Central Africa, where "conventional modesty forbids a woman to speak to her husband, or even to see him,

if it can be avoided." Here then is a vera causa in active operation now among savage races, and almost certainly existing in ancient times among the Hindoos and Greeks, among whom the legends of Urvasi, and of Cupid and Pysche, sprang up. The origin of the custom is, of course, beyond the scope of the work. It must be sought in Mr. Tyloes books, or in Mr. M'Clellan's Primitive Marriage. It is sufficient for Mr. Lang's purpose to show that the custom is as widespread as the tale, and is quite sufficient to account for the legend which explains it, or half explkins it, to civilised peoples. This is the constructive portion of the work. The destructive portion, in which he sets against one another the conflicting theories of the mythologists and their mutually-destructive etymologies, and laughs them to scorn, is in Mr. Lang's best manner, and an excellent

example of the adage, " Ridentem dicere vernm quid vetat P" Certainly, a system which in one man's bands makes -Cryan "the chaste dawn" and in another "the luxurious, lewd

wanton "—which, according to Max Miller, is a myth of sun and dawn, and to Kuhn a fire-myth—is not exact enough for science, besides leaving unexplained the pith of the story, the prohibition of the bride seeing her husband "without his royal robes." It is true, indeed, that Mr. Lang places his opposition to the older methods a little too high. There is no reason why the same tale may not be compounded of many elements,—the customary, the historical, and the true mythological. The tale of Cupid and Psyche, as it stands in Apuleins, has certainly been transfused with the mythological and allegorical spirit. Eros and Psyche bear their meaning on the surface, and the tale, as it stands, is a "moral tale," pointing to the etherealising of sensual passion into spiritual love, and is worked out in a way certainly not explicable on the purely savage-custom hypothesis. The same qualification applies with -even greater force to Mr. Lang's explanation of the myth of passion, or, as he calls it—implying a very dangerous theory " a far-travelled tale." The essential incidents of the tale he regards as the bringing of the young hero to the home of a dangerous being, animal, giant, wizard ; the daughter falling in love with him, the overcoming of dangers, and the Hight of the pair; the pursuit, and the interposition of obstacles more or less miraculous in the path of the pursuers. The tale is traced in Gaelic, Slavonic, Zulu, Japanese, Algonquin, and Samoese versions. Mr. Lang infers that the tale has spread from one .centre :—

" The central part of the myth is incapable of being explained, either as a nature myth or as a myth founded on a disease of language. So many languages could not take the same malady in the same way ; nor can we imagine any series of natural phenomena that would inevitably suggest this tale to so many diverse races. We must suppose, therefore, that all wits jumped and invented the same romantic series of situations by accident, or that all men spread from one centre when the story was known, or that the story, once invented, has drifted all round the world."

The last is th,e explanation supported by the author. But if it be the true one, then the wildest imaginings of those excellent people who discover the ten tribes of Israel alike in the English, the Gipsies, the Afghans, and the North-American Indians, and who see versions of the Creation and the Hebrew Temple among the Himalayan tribes, and the Australian Aborigines, in Deucalion and Mania, and the Maori creator, are amply justified. Mr. Casaubon was right; and the key to all mythologies may be found in the first chapter of Genesis. Surely the unlikeness in the various tales is as great as their likeness. The marriage customs which underlie the various versions of Cupid and Psyche are such as might naturally and easily spring up wherever exogamy prevailed, or wherever abduction and seduction by force or fraud were the true sanction of marriage, that is, in barbarous times, " mostwheres." Is not the true origin of the Jason myth to be found in similar natural causes ? After all, the point of the story is little more than "over brakes, over briars, love will find out his way" ; and the savage Shakespeares have merely woven well known magical incidents by way of embroidery around the stories of barbarous Juliets and Romeos, whose family jars prevented the course of true love from running smooth. Mr. Lang's hypothesis is too violent, and is not supported by the evidence. It takes us out of the region of rational explanation into that of guess-work, and leaves us, in a scientific point of view, no better off than the guesses of Enhemerus or the random shots of the etymologists. But whether we accept Mr. Lang's theories on this or other points or not, he has done good service in pointing out the weakness of older theories, and has opened up a new mine of suggestions which will at least serve to supplement, if they are not held to supplant, existing explanations.

MR. GEORGE MACDONALD'S NEW SERMONS.*

E VERY one remembers the story of how, when Coleridge asked Charles Lamb whether he had ever heard him preach, Lamb replied that he had never heard Coleridge do anything else. Draw from this saying its little sting of sarcasm, and allow for its humorous exaggeration, and it fits Mr. MacDonald quite as well as it fitted the great man who called it forth. As a matter of hard, prosaic fact, Mr. MacDonald has done many things

besides preaching, and has done them as only a man of genius can ; but it may fairly be said that his novels, his poems, and his criticisms owe a great deal of their permanent value, as they certainly owe not a little of their immediate popularity, to the quantity of homiletic matter which they hold in solution. There are many people who could not be induced to read a volume of undisguised sermons who not only enjoy being preached to, but receive much profit from the preaching, when they can get their sermonic medicine cunningly administered to them in a pleasant imaginative vehicle ; and we could mention at least one prevalent method of statement lathe realm of Christian doctrine, the widespread adoption of which is due in larger measure to the novels of Mr. MacDonald than to the systematic utterances of other men with whose names it is more frequently associated.

In more than one volume, however, Mr. MacDonald has delivered his message, not allusively or parabolically, but in the simple and direct fashion of the ordinary preacher, and has told his vision, not alone in brief scattered hints, but with the continuity and coherence of presentation which enable us to see the very thing that he sees, instead of merely perceiving that he sees something. The first series of Unspoken Sermons has not, we think, been estimated at its true value, save by a comparatively small number of readers. It was a really remarkable book ; as any book must be which is the work of one whose spiritual instincts are naturally healthy, and who relies upon them with an unshaken and apparently unshakeable confidence—a confidence which may look like the reckless temerity of presumptuous manhood, but is really the faith of the child who is not afraid to travel along unfamiliar paths, because he believes, with Mrs. Oliphant's little pilgrim, that "all the ways lead to our Father." We cannot say that we think the present volume quite equal to its predecessor. The twelve discourses which it contains are much longer than those in the volume of 1867, and they seem to us thinner, more elaborated, less spontaneous, and less penetrating. It must be at least ten years since the present writer last read the sermons entitled, "The Consuming Fire," "The Higher Faith," "The New Name," and "The God of the Living ;" but they have at this moment a firmer hold upon his memory than certain sermons in this second series which he has perused within the last fortyeight hours ; and, though the most rememberable sermon is not necessarily the most valuable, it is impossible to escape from the feeling that there is a want of spiritual or intellectual grip in any sermon which fails to make an enduring impression upon a sympathetic mind. Perhaps the main difference between the two volumes lies in the fact that while in the latter the preacher expounds certain thoughts that he has laid hold of, in the former he proclaimed thoughts, or rather insights, which had laid hold of him, and which, therefore, gave him the power to lay hold of his readers. There is much in this new book that is very true, very beautiful, and very valuable ; but, as a whole, it lacks some of the inspiration which pervaded its predecessor.

We must, however, ask the reader to lay stress on the parenthetical phrase "as a whole." Of one or two sermons, and various portions of sermons, it assuredly must be said that this inspiration—this quality which is at once arresting and illuminating—is noticeably present. It is some time since we have read any discourse more helpful in the penetrating way in which it goes to the very heart of the matter in hand and opens up the full significance of a great moral crisis than that on "The Hardness of the Way "; nor have we often seen any treatment of the difficulties connected with the subject of Prayer which is at once so entirely candid and so generally satisfying as that of the two sermons devoted to this theme,—a theme which must always have such a powerful fascination for the perplexed spirit which needs rest, but which will rest only in the truth. The first of the discourses we have mentioned deals with the story of the rich young man who went away grieved from the presence of Christ. Of course, much of the significance of the narrative lies upon the surface, and cannot be missed by the most ordinary interpreter. The only difficulty relates to the scope of our Lord's appeal. Are His words, "Sell all thou hast," addressed to us or to any of us to-day? if to any of us, then to whom ? if not to us at all, why not? That these questions are difficult cannot be denied; but they are not too difficult to be answered to the satisfaction of the spirit ; and the answers given by Mr. MacDonald seem to give just this satisfaction—that is, they meet the needs of those who have reached a point in their spiritual history at which it becomes imperative that some immediate answer shall be forthcoming. To the ordinary and merely curious questioner who asks whether the appeal of Christ is addressed to him, and evidently hopes that the answer will be in the negative, Mr. MacDonald's first reply is simply a reminder of the spiritual state of him to whom the appeal was originally made :—

"Can you have failed to note that it is the youth who has been for years observing the commandments on whom the further and, to you, startling command is laid, to part with all that he has ? Surely not ! Are you then one on whom because of correspondent condition, the same command could be laid ? Have you, in any sense like that in which the youth answered the question, kept the commandments ? Have you, unsatisfied with what keeping you have given them, and filled with desire to be perfect, gone kneeling to the Master to learn the way to eternal life ? or are you so well satisfied with what you are that you have never sought eternal life, never hungered and thirsted after the righteousness of God, the perfection of year being ? If this latter be your condition, then be comforted ; the Master does not require of you to sell what you have and give to the poor. You follow him ! You go with him to preach good tidings !—you who do not care for righteousness ! You are not one whose company is desirable to the Master. Be comforted, I say, he does not want you ; he will not ask you to open your purse for him, you may give or withhold ; it is nothing to him. What ! is he to be obliged to one outside his kingdom—to the untrue, the ignoble—for money ? Bring him a true heart, an obedient hand : he has given his life-blood for that ;

but for your money—he neither needs it nor cares for it

At this point, the preacher assumes that the person addressed will deprecate his harshness, and declare that though he may be unwilling to part from his money without the certainty that it is required from him, he is not indifferent to higher things. To this, Mr. MacDonald replies :—

"Once more, then, go and keep the Commandments. It has not come to your money yet.. The Commandments are enough for you.

As to your money, let the Commandments direct you how to use it When, in keeping the Commandments you have

-found the great reward of loving righteousness—the further reward of discovering that with all the energy you ean put forth, you are but an unprofitable servant ; when you have come to know that the law can be kept only by such as need no law; when you have come to feel that you would rather pass out of being than live on such a poor, miserable, selfish life as alone you can call yours ; when you are aware of a something beyond all that your mind can think, yet not beyond what your heart can desire—a something which is not yours, seems as if it never could be yours, which yet your life is worthless without; when you have come, therefore, to the Master with the cry, What shall I do that I may inherit eternal life ?' it may be he will then say to you, Sell all that you have and give to the poor, and come follow me.' If he do, then will you be of men most bononrable if you obey—of men most pitiable if you refuse. Till then you would be no Comfort to him, no pleasure to his friends For the young man to have sold all and followed him would have been to accept God's patent of peerage ; to you it is not offered. Were one of the disobedient, in the hope of the honour, to part with every straw he possessed, he would but be sent back to keep the commandments in the new and easier circumstances of his poverty."

This seems to us a singularly profound and searching piece of exposition, and it is clenched by an arresting appeal to those who find comfort and relief in the thought that Christ has no need or them—that they who have shown no love are assuredly not called upon for the sacrifice which it is love's delight as well as love's honour to make. It is in such passages as this that Mr. .MacDonald not only manifests the penetrating veracity of his spiritual insight, but also vindicates the strenuous severity of teaching which is often supposed to be limp and invertebrate, because in its attempt to persuade men it uses not the terrors of the theologians but the terrors of the Lord.

The two sermons upon Prayer are, we think, equally valuable. In the first there is not perhaps much that can lay claim to mere intellectual novelty. Others have anticipated Mr. MacDonald in the answer which he gives to the most specious, because, apparently, most devout, objection to the efficacy of prayer—the objection that prayer is useless, because, whether we pray or not, God will do the best thing for us—by showing that prayer enables us to receive a higher good than we could receive without it, and that indeed there are things which are good when given as answers to prayer which, in the absence of prayer, would have been less good for us—perhaps not good at all. Even these thoughts, however, familiar as they may be to some, are, as presented in these pages, so obviously the results of direct insight and personal experience, that they come to us with a new power and freshness ; and the second of the two sermons, which deals with the confessedly difficult subject of Intercessory Prayer, seems to us to take rank with the most valuable and illuminating of Mr. MacDonald's utterances. No one who knows what it is to pray could bear to pray for himself alone ; the cry of intercession must needs burst from his heart ; and yet, at the same time, his intellect may be perplexed by the thought that objections which may have no validity as against the individual cry for help, have a terrible weight when brought against the prayer for the needs of others. In this latter case, the prayer arises from nothing in the person prayed for ; it cannot, therefore, so far as we can see, increase his spiritual receptivity or preparedness. "Why, then," to quote the preacher's words, "should it initiate a change in God's dealing with him ?"

Mr. MacDonald frankly admits that he does not know how to answer his own question ; and yet he feels that he may—nay, that he must—pray for his friend, for his enemy, for anybody. It is, of course, impossible to justify a mere spiritual instinct to those who do not possess it ; but to those who do possess it, and yet hardly dare to trust it in the absence of justifying considerations, Mr. MacDonald has much to say which can hardly fail to be of inestimable value and comfort. As he says, he "can but speculate and suggest ;" but as he also says—and the remark is one which ought to bring a ray of light to every clouded spirit,—" there are some things for which the very possibility of supposing them is an argument." The spiritual weight of the sermon can only be felt in reading it as a whole, because its various thoughts support and ratify each other; but the following passage may serve to indicate the preacher's position :—

"If in God we live and move and have our being ; if the very possibility of loving lies in this, that we exist in and by the live air of love, namely, God himself, we must in this fact be nearer to each other than by any bodily proximity or interchange of help ; and if prayer is like a pulse which sets this atmosphere in motion, we must then, by prayer, come closer to each other than are the parts of our body by their complex nerve-telegraphy. Surely, in the Eternal, hearts are never parted ! surely, through the Eternal, a heart that loves and seeks the good of another, must hold that other within reach ! Barely the system of things would not be complete in relation to the boat thing in it—love itself, if love had no help in prayer. If I love and cannot help, does not my love move me to ask him to help who loves and can ?—him, without whom life would be to me nothing, without whom I should neither love nor care to pray ! —will he answer, Child, do not trouble me ; I am already doing all I can I' If such answer came, who that loved would not be content to be nowhere in the matter ? But how, if the eternal limitless Love, the unspeakable, self-forgetting, God-devotion which, demanding all, gives all, should say, Child, I have been doing all I could ; but now you are come I shall be able to do more ! Here is a corner for you, my little one ; push at this thing to get it out of the way !' How if he should answer, Pray on, my child ; I am hearing you ; it goes

through Me in help to him" what then ?"

There is a tendency towards sentimentality in the mode of presentation here which may repel some, while others will shrink from the idea of God standing in need of the help of his children; but, as a matter of fact, it is simply the defect in the expression of the thought which makes the thought itself in any way repellent. God certainly cannot need the help of beings whom He has called into existence, and whose existence he sustains ; but He allows them to work with Him that they may share with Him the joy of service; and if the industrious farmer be— as he undoubtedly is—a fellow-worker with God in Nature, and.

the righteous statesman a fellow-worker in providence, why may not the humblest of His children be such a worker in the great region of His redeeming activity ? This seems to us what Mr. MacDonald means, and we do not see how any devout thinker can reject his meaning; but here, as elsewhere in this volume, he is less happy, because more self-conscious in his way of putting things, than in his previous volume. Still, even in this second series, Mr. MacDonald gives us much of his beat; and how good his best is we need not say.