No method has yet been discovered for preserving the recollection of
human actions and events precisely as they have occurred, whole and
unimpaired, in all their truth and reality. Time is an able teacher of
causes and qualities, but he setteth little store by names and persons,
or the mould and fashion of their deeds. The pyramids have outlived the
very names of their builders. "Oblivion," says Sir Thomas Browne,
"blindly scatters her poppies. Time has spared the epitaph of Adrian's
horse--confounded that of himself!"
Few things are so durable as the memory of those mischiefs and
oppressions which Time has bequeathed to mankind. The names of
conquerors and tyrants have been faithfully preserved, while those from
whom have originated the most useful and beneficial discoveries are
entirely unknown, or left to perish in darkness and uncertainty. We
should not have known that Lucullus brought cherries from the banks of
the Phasis but through the details of massacre and spoliation--the
splendid barbarities of a Roman triumph. In some instances Time displays
a fondness and a caprice in which the gloomiest tyranny is seen
occasionally to indulge. The unlettered Arab cherishes the memory of his
line. He traces it unerringly to a remoter origin than could be claimed
or identified by the most ancient princes of Europe. In many instances
he could give a clearer and a higher genealogy to his horse. But that
which Time herself would spare, the critic and the historian would
demolish. The northern barbarians are accused of an exterminating
hostility to learning. It never was half so bitter as the warfare which
learning displays against everything of which she herself is not the
author. A living historian has denied that the poems of Ossian had any
existence save in the conceptions of Macpherson, because he
condescendingly informs us, "Before the invention or introduction of
letters, human memory is incapable of any faithful record which may be
transmitted from age to age."
The account which Macpherson gave may be a fiction, but it is admitted
by those who know the native Scotch and Irish tongues, and have dwelt
where no other language is spoken, that there are poems which have been
transmitted from generation to generation (orally it must be, since
letters are either entirely unknown or are comparatively of recent
introduction), the machinery of which prove them to have been invented
about the time when Christianity was first preached in these islands.
Tradition may well be named the eldest daughter of Time, and
nursing-mother of the Muses--the fruitful parent of that very learning
which would, in the cruel spirit of its pedantry and malice, make her
the sacrifice while it lays claim to the inheritance. What is learning
but a laborious, often ill-drawn, and almost invariably partial
deduction from facts which tradition has first collected? When we
consider in whose hands learning has been, almost ever since its
creation; the uses which have been made of it by priests and
politicians; by poets, orators, and flatterers; by controversialists and
designing historians;--how commonly has it been perverted to abuse the
very senses of mankind, and to give a bias to their thoughts and
feelings, only to mislead and to betray! Let the evidence be well
compared, and a view taken of the respective amounts of doubt and
certainty which appertain to human history as it appears in written
records; and it will be seen that, to verify any given fact, so as to
prevent the possibility of doubt, we must throw aside our reverence for
the scholar's pen and the midnight lamp, which seem, like the faculty of
speech, only given to men, as the witty Frenchman observed, "to conceal
their thoughts." This comparative process is precisely what has been
adopted by M.L. Petit Radel in his new theory upon the origin of Greece.
"Not satisfied with the mythological equivocation and contradictory
statements which till now have perplexed the question, after a residence
of ten years this learned man returns with a new theory, which would
destroy all our received ideas, and carry the civilisation and cradle of
the Greeks much beyond the time and place that have till now been
supposed. It is their very architecture that M. Petit Radel
interrogates, and its passive testimony serves as a basis to his system.
He has visited, compared, and meditated on the unequivocal vestiges of
more than one hundred and fifty antique citadels, altogether neglected
by the Greek and Roman authors. Their form and construction serve him,
with the aid of ingenious reasoning, to prove that Greece was civilised
a long time before the arrival of the Egyptian colonies. He does not
despair of tracing back the descent of the Greeks to the Hyperborean
nations, always by the analogy of their structures, which, by a singular
identity, are found also among the Phoenicians. The Institute have
pronounced the following judgment upon his theory:--'If the developments
which remain to be given to us suffice to gain the votes of the learned,
and induce them to adopt this theory as demonstrated truth, M.L. Petit
Radel may flatter himself with having made in history a discovery truly
worthy to occupy a place in the progress of human genius.'"
Thus the very time in which a living historian of England has chosen to
inflict an impotent blow, from the leaden sceptre of Johnsonian
criticism, upon all facts which claim an existence anterior to the
invention of books, appears pregnant with a discovery of a method of
investigating the most remote eras, which presupposes an inherent spirit
of fallacy and falsehood in all written records of their existence.
About three hundred years after the era of the Olympiads, the first date
of authentic history, Herodotus astonished his countrymen by the
writings he brought forth. Who kept the records out of which his work
was elaborated ere he was ready to stamp the facts with the only seal
which our modern historians will acknowledge or allow? Tradition
doubtless was his guide, which the learned themselves complain of as the
source of what they term his errors and his fables. But the voice of
tradition has often reinstated his claims to our belief, where it had
been suspended either by ignorance or pretensions to superior knowledge.
A modern traveller found, in one of the isles of the Grecian
Archipelago, undoubted vestiges of a state of society similar to that of
the Amazons. The order of the sexes was wholly inverted. The wife ruled
the husband, and his and her kindred, with uncontrolled and unsparing
rigour, sanctioned and even commanded by the laws. Yet the very
existence of any such people as the Amazons of ancient history has not
only been questioned, but denied. Learning has proved it to be
impossible.
The Marquess of Hastings told the Rev. Mr Swan, chaplain of the
Cambrian, that he had found the germ of fact from which many of the most
incredible tales in ancient history had grown during his stay in India.
One instance only we would relate. A Grecian author mentions a people
who had only one leg. An embassy from the interior was conducted into
the presence of the viceroy, and he could by no persuasion prevail upon
the obsequious minister to use more than one of his legs, though he
stood during the whole of a protracted audience.
But there are other forces now drawing into the field to support the
long-neglected claims of tradition. Etymology, which professed to settle
doubts by an appeal to the elementary sounds of words, was banished from
the politer and more influential circles of English learning by a decree
as arbitrary as that pronounced on the poems of Ossian. It has come back
with a new commission and under a new title;--Ethnography is the name
given by our continental neighbours to this new science, which, in its
future developments, may bring to light some of the most obscure and
important circumstances affecting the human race, from its origin
through every succeeding epoch of its existence. The distinguishing
object of this inquiry is to identify the fortunes, migrations, and
changes of the human family as to situation, policy, religion,
agriculture, and arts, by comparing the terms supplied by or introduced
into the language of any one country with the names of the same objects
in every other. There would be no such thing as chance in nature could
we know the laws which determine every separate accident. In like manner
there will scarcely be any doubt respecting the primitive history of man
when this new science shall have accumulated and revealed all the
treasures which it may be enabled to appropriate. An agreement in the
primitive term which any object of cultivation, physical or moral, bears
among many different tribes, spread over many and far-distant regions,
will be considered as the best evidence of one common origin.
Disagreement in a similar case, accompanied with a great variety of
terms of considerable dissonance, will be equally conclusive as to the
object being indigenous or of a multifarious origin.
Already has Balbi, in his Ethnographic Atlas, given us a list of names
and coincidences to an extent truly astonishing. Yet what is this, in
fact, but a judicious use of Bacon's old but much-neglected rule of
questioning nature about facts instead of theories--examining evidences
ere rhetoric had made language one vast heap of implied falsehood?
In a court of inquiry we examine witnesses as to facts, not opinions.
But the historian reads mankind in cities; the philosopher in the
clouds. He who is anxious for the truth should look abroad on the plains
or in the woods, where man's first prerogative, the giving of names, was
exercised. His knowledge of nature must be wretchedly imperfect who
thinks that no grand outline of truth can possibly exist in the dim
records of human recollection ere the pen of the scholar was employed to
depict the scenes that opinion or prejudice had created. How many pages
of Clarendon's, Hume's, or even Robertson's history would be cancelled
if we had access to all the recollections of each event, and the
evidence of the unlettered vulgar who had witnessed the fact brought to
our notice, even through the mouthpiece of tradition!
There is more truth than comes to the surface in that speech put into
the lips of the father of lies by a late poet, where he says--
"The Bible's your book--history mine."
Savigny makes the same charge against one class of historians in his own
country:--"However discordant," says he, "their other doctrines may
appear, they agree in the practice of adopting each a particular system,
and in viewing all historical evidence as so many proofs of its truth."
Were it not for that contempt we have already noticed as the offspring
of pride and dogmatism, and which, in the administration of the republic
of letters, has been entertained and openly proclaimed for every kind of
history except that which its own acts may have originated, we should
have been in possession of thousands of facts and notions now overlaid
and lost irrecoverably to the philosopher and the historian.
The origin and the progress of nations, next after the school divinity
of the Middle Ages, has occasioned the most copious outpouring of
conjectural criticism. The simple mode of research suggested by the
works of Verstegan, Camden, and Spelman would, long before this time,
have made the early history of the British tribes as clear as it is now
obscure. Analogies in the primary sounds of each dialect; similarity or
difference in regard to objects of the first, or of a common necessity;
rules or laws for the succession of property, which are as various as
the tribes which overran the empire; the nature, agreement, or
dissimilarity in religious worship with those vestiges of its ritual and
celebration which, by the "pious frauds" and connivance of the early
church, still lurk in the pastimes of our rural districts:--the new
science of which we have spoken, by taking cognisance of these and all
other existing sources of legitimate investigation, will settle the
source and affinities of nations upon a plan as much superior to that of
Grotius and his school as fact and reason exceed the guess-work of the
theorist and the historian. Meantime we would cite a few examples that
illustrate and bear more particularly on the subject to which our
inquiries have been directed.
Nothing seems at first sight more difficult than to establish a
community of origin between the gods of Olympus and those of the
Scandinavian mythology. The attempt has often been made, and each time
with increased success. Observe the process adopted in this interesting
inquiry.
"Every country in Europe has invested its popular fictions with the
same common marvels--all acknowledge the agency of the lifeless
productions of nature; the intervention of the same supernatural
machinery; the existence of elves, fairies, dwarfs, giants, witches, and
enchanters; the use of spells, charms, and amulets, and all those
highly-gifted objects, of whatever form or name, whose attributes refute
every principle of human experience, which are to conceal the
possessor's person, annihilate the bounds of space, or command a
gratification of all our wishes. These are the constantly-recurring
types which embellish the popular tale: which have been transferred to
the more laboured pages of romance; and which, far from owing their
first appearance in Europe to the Arabic conquest of Spain, or the
migrations of Odin to Scandinavia, are known to have been current on its
eastern verge long anterior to the era of legitimate history. The
Nereids of antiquity, the daughters of the 'sea-born seer,' are
evidently the same with the mermaids of the British and northern shores.
The inhabitants of both are fixed in crystal caves or coral palaces
beneath the waters of the ocean; they are alike distinguished for their
partialities to the human race, and their prophetic powers in disclosing
the events of futurity. The Naiads differ only in name from the Nixen of
Germany and Scandinavia (Nisser), or the water-elves of our countrymen.
Ælfric and the Nornæ, who wove the web of life, and sang the fortunes of
the illustrious Helga, are but the same companions who attended Ilithyia
at the births of Iamos and Hercules," the venerable Parcæ of antiquity.
The Russian Rusalkis are of the same family. The man-in-the-moon has
found a circulation throughout the world. "The clash of elements in the
thunder-storm was ascribed in Hellas to the rolling chariot-wheels of
Jove, and in the Scandinavian mythology to the ponderous waggon of the
Norwegian Thor."
To the above extract, which is taken from the excellent preface by the
editor to Wharton's _History of English Poetry_, may be added the number
of high peaks bearing the name of Tor or Thor, seen more especially on
both coasts of Devonshire, and which are supposed to signalise the
places of his worship.[6] From the same source may be derived affinities
equally strong between the Highland Urisks, the Russian Leschies, the
Pomeranian or Wendish Berstucs, and the Panes and Panisci who presided
over the fields and forests of Arcadia. The mountains of Germany and
Scandinavia are under the governance of a set of metallurgic divinities,
who agree with the Cabiri, Hephæsti, Telchines, and Idæan Dactyli. The
Brownies and Fairies are of the same kindred as the Lares of Latium.
"The English Puck, the Scottish Bogle, the French Esprit Follet, or
Goblin, the Gobelinus of monkish Latinity, and the German Kobold, are
only varied names for the Grecian Kobalus, whose sole delight consisted
in perplexing the human race, and calling up those harmless terrors that
constantly hover round the minds of the timid." "The English and
Scottish terms, '_Puck,' 'Bogle'_, are the same as the German 'Spuk' and
the Danish 'Spogelse,' without the sibilant aspiration. These words are
general names for any kind of spirit, and correspond to the 'pouk' of
Piers Ploughman. In Danish 'spog' means a joke, trick, or prank, and
hence the character of Robin Goodfellow. In Iceland Puki is regarded as
an evil sprite; and in the language of that country, 'at pukra' means
both to make a murmuring noise and to steal clandestinely. The names of
these spirits seem to have originated in their boisterous
temper--'spuken,' Germ. to make a noise: 'spog,' Dan. obstreperous
mirth; 'pukke,' Dan. to boast, scold. The Germans use 'pochin' in the
same figurative sense, though literally it means to strike, beat; and is
the same with our _poke_."
However varied in name, the persons and attributes of these immaterial
beings have no variance which will not readily be accounted for by the
difference of climate, territorial surface, and any priority that one
tribe had gained over another in the march of mind. The relics of such a
system were much more abundant half-a-century ago, and many a tale of
love and violence, garnished with the machinery of that _mythos_, might
have been gleaned from the unwritten learning of the people. Who would
expect to find amongst the rudest of the Irish peasantry--whose
ancestors never knew the use of letters, and by whom, even down to
living generations, the English tongue has not been spoken--a number of
fictions, amongst the rest the tale of Cupid and Psyche--closely
corresponding to that of the Greeks?[7] Who that has been a child does
not recollect the untiring delight with which he listened to those
ingenious arithmetical progressions, reduced to poetry, called "_The
House that Jack built_," and the perils of "_The Old Woman with the
Pig_?" Few even of those in riper years would suspect their Eastern
origin. In the _Sepher Haggadah_ there is an ancient parabolical hymn,
in the Chaldee language, sung by the Jews at the feast of the Passover,
and commemorative of the principal events in the history of that people.
For the following literal translation we are indebted to Dr Henderson,
the celebrated orientalist:--
"1. _A kid, a kid_ my father bought,
For two pieces of money.
A kid, a kid.
"2. Then came _the cat_, and ate the kid,
That my father bought,
For two pieces of money.
A kid, a kid.
"3. Then came _the dog_, and bit the cat,
That ate the kid,
That my father bought,
For two pieces of money.
A kid, a kid.
"4. Then came _the staff_, and beat the dog,
That bit the cat,
That ate the kid,
That my father bought,
For two pieces of money.
A kid, a kid.
"5. Then came _the fire_, and burnt the staff,
That beat the dog,
That bit the cat,
That ate the kid,
That my father bought,
For two pieces of money.
A kid, a kid.
"6. Then came _the water_, and quenched the fire,
That burnt the staff,
That beat the dog,
That bit the cat,
That ate the kid,
That my father bought,
For two pieces of money.
A kid, a kid.
"7. Then came _the ox_, and drank the water,
That quenched the fire,
That burnt the staff,
That beat the dog,
That bit the cat,
That ate the kid,
That my father bought,
For two pieces of money.
A kid, a kid.
"8. Then came _the butcher_, and slew the ox,
That drank the water,
That quenched the fire,
That burnt the staff,
That beat the dog,
That bit the cat,
That ate the kid,
That my father bought,
For two pieces of money,
A kid, a kid.
"9. Then came _the angel of death_, and killed the butcher,
That slew the ox.
That drank the water,
That quenched the fire,
That burnt the staff,
That beat the dog,
That bit the cat,
That ate the kid,
That my father bought,
For two pieces of money.
A kid, a kid.
"10. Then came _the Holy One_, blessed be He!
And killed the angel of death,
That killed the butcher,
That slew the ox,
That drank the water,
That quenched the fire,
That burnt the staff,
That beat the dog,
That bit the cat,
That ate the kid,
That my father bought,
For two pieces of money.
A kid, a kid."
The following is the interpretation by P.N. Leberecht, Leipzig, 1731.
"1.--The kid, which was one of the pure animals, denotes the Hebrews.
"The father, by whom it was purchased, is Jehovah, who represents
himself as sustaining this relation to the Hebrew people.
"The two pieces of money signify Moses and Aaron, through whose
mediation the Hebrews were brought out of Egypt.
"2.--The cat denotes the Assyrians, by whom the ten tribes were carried
into captivity.
"3.--The dog is symbolical of the Babylonians.
"4.--The staff signifies the Persians.
"5.--The fire indicates the Grecian empire under Alexander the Great.
"6.--The water betokens the Roman, or the fourth of the great monarchies
to whose dominion the Jews were subjected.
"7--- The ox is a symbol of the Saracens, who subdued Palestine, and
brought it under the caliphate.
"8.--The butcher that killed the ox denotes the Crusaders, by whom the
Holy Land was wrested out of the hands of the Saracens.
"9.--The angel of death signifies the Turkish power, by which the land
of Palestine was taken from the Franks, and to which it is still
subject.
"10.--The commencement of the tenth stanza is designed to show that God
will take signal vengeance on the Turks, immediately after whose
overthrow the Jews are to be restored to their own land, and live under
the government of their long-expected Messiah."