MYTH AS LITERATURE
The presupposition that myth is _par excellence_ the literary material
for young children doubtless grew out of a misinterpretation of the
so-called mythopoeic age in the children, and some fundamental
misconception of the nature of myth and its relation to other folk and
traditionary material. There is no place in this little book even to
suggest the problems that surround the nature and genesis of myth. But
it does seem desirable to make in a simple way a few distinctions that
may serve to set us on the right road.
First of all, myth is religion, and not art. It is not a thing of mere
imagination. It is the explanation or interpretation of some physical
fact, some historical occurrence, some social custom, some racial
characteristic, some established ritual or worship. It is the religious
or emotional response to some influence or activity in the world so
impressive or so efficacious as to seem to call for explanation in terms
of supernatural agencies.
This explanatory or interpretative stage or aspect of myth may be first
historically, or it may not be. It is probably first in most myths in a
simple and crude form, which in all developed myths has been enriched
and modified by influences from the other stages and aspects. The second
stage--or shall we call it merely another aspect--is the assigning of
distinct personality and individuality to the agencies assumed to
account for events and appearances. Then follows rapidly the
interrelations and interactions of these persons, the surrounding of
them with friends and subordinates, the building-up of a whole intricate
society of divinities after the model of human society--all at first
symbolistic and of religious significance. A third stage or aspect is
that of the cult, the worship, the establishment of a priesthood
delivering authoritative messages, mediating influences to the people,
and adding constantly to the body of explanations and interpretations
surrounding each divinity. The fourth stage or aspect is that in which
it becomes, or becomes identified with, a body of moral doctrines or
ethical principles; where the personal divinities, with their qualities,
insignia, and associations, are taken as symbols of inner human forces,
of moral and social achievement, as expressions of spiritual influences
operant in human nature and life.
Let it be understood that in naming these stages or aspects there has
been no attempt to place them either in chronological or in logical
order, and no intention of saying that they stand apart from one another
in an easily recognized distinctness. But, however interlinked and
mutually modified they may be, we must in any discussion of myth, be
aware of these four sides or steps.
Take, for example, the Greek myth of Apollo. As an explanation of
physical phenomena he is light or fire, sometimes specialized as the
spirit of the sun. But he is embodied and endowed with a personality; he
has social conditions and subsidiary functions assigned to him. As a
person he is the son of Zeus and Leto, twin brother of Artemis, leader
of the nine Muses, guardian of pastured flocks and herds, as Artemis of
the wild creatures who feed or frolic by night. As his worship spread
and deepened, there gathered about him many other functions--he was the
god of healing, of music, of law, of atonement; and many tributary and
subordinate divinities were associated with him in all these activities.
There gathered into his myth also an enormous and complex body of
stories, romantic and mystical, explanatory and prophetic--stories of
adventure, of contact with the other gods, of sojourns with men, of
pilgrimages to unknown regions; some of them merely romantic, some of
them symbolistic, many of them profoundly significant of his powers and
offices.
And the myth of Apollo is remarkable for its ancient and elaborate
worship. Already when the Homeric poems were made, the shrine of Apollo
at Delphos was the scene of an old and complicated ritual. There was
even then a temple rich with the accumulated treasure of the votive
offerings of generations of worshipers. Priests and prophets, the mystic
offices of the Pythia, poets and musicians, stately processions of kings
and warriors seeking oracles, combined to maintain the dignity and
sanctity of this most impressive worship.
From the very earliest times of which we have record of this myth,
Apollo was known to be a spiritual and ethical force at work in man's
soul. He was named when men tried to speak of those experiences which
wrought expiation and purification. He stood for milder law, for
beneficent and benevolent social order, for art, for the songs of the
sacred bard, the dirge of grief, the paean of victory, the games--all
the gentler things of social culture and personal experience.
In these and in many other ways did the myth of Apollo express the human
soul and act upon it. It was a religion--as every developed myth is--to
be handled reverently. We might have chosen other examples quite as
elaborate and as full of mystic significance--the myth of Dionysus, or
the more widespread and deeply devotional myth of Demeter.
Art, too, concerned as it is with everything that promotes or reflects
man's spirit, has uses for the elements of myth, and has its own way of
handling them. On two of the four steps of myth art, especially
literature, finds acceptable material. On the stage named second--the
stage in which the influence or power becomes personified, takes on
relations to other personified influences, and calls into being other
divine persons, his children, his helpers and subordinates, takes his
place in a society of divinities, and exercises his more or less
specialized function in this society, and also in human life and
activity--have the poets and romancers found many opportunities.
Adventures and romantic experiences of all sorts easily attached
themselves to the person of some divinity, especially as the character
of the personal divinities became more and more humanized by the
accretion of such tales. And while we find echoes of myth in _Maerchen_
and romance, we quite as constantly find apotheosis of merely human
romance and adventure in myth. Among the literary peoples, poets and
dramatists found it often desirable to use the foundation of this group
of divine personalities as the starting-point for a performance purely
artistic; it gave them the immense advantage of starting without
explanation and preparation, since their audiences could be counted upon
to know the divine personages and circumstances; and the further
advantage of adding dignity and size to their inventions by accrediting
them to superhuman agents. These literary additions, these variations
upon the religious meanings, invented for artistic purposes, often
gradually incorporated themselves into the myth, and by modern students
are not carefully distinguished from the other, the religious and
devotional elements. A comic adventure told of Hermes may not have in it
any more of myth than a similar story told of Autolycus.
Literature finds much use for material of the mythical kind on what we
have called the fourth step. To express and render concrete, impulses,
influences, and powers that sway and dignify human conduct, and that
form and ennoble human character, the literary artist gladly employs the
persons of the great myths. All human experience has elements and
influences coming into it from an apparently mystic sphere, that must
either be described in abstract terms or embodied in concrete persons
and symbols. The latter is ever the method of art. So we find everywhere
in literature the use of the great symbols already constituted in myth,
or the invention of new symbols for the purpose. Homer would convey to
us the sense of the presence that guided and guarded the wise and
resourceful Odysseus; so the stately Athene, ages long the goddess "who
giveth skill in fair works, and noble minds," comes and goes through the
poem. Hauptmann would convey to us in _The Sunken Bell_, some impression
of the magic and the charm of that beauty which lies in the free soul
and wild nature, so he invents Rautendelein. But neither Homer nor
Hauptmann is priest or devotee interpreting facts or conserving worship.
They are artists picturing human life and introducing, each in its
place, the various elements of human experience.
It is in regard to this literary use of myth that there exists much
confusion, and that most mistakes are made as to the educational use of
myth. Many persons who contend that "myths" can be given to children as
literature call the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ "myths;" indeed, they are
likely to call all legendary stories in which the supernatural element
is large "myths;" and they call all romantic stories that have become
attached to any divinity "myths."
We should distinguish myth from saga, from legend, from merely fanciful
symbolistic tales, from tales of human heroes. The Homeric poems make
much of the religious side of human nature, and the poet chose in order
to give to his action and issue a superhuman dignity to set that action
in the presence of the gods themselves. Yea, in the climaxes of the
Titanic struggle the Powers themselves take a hand, so deeply does the
poet feel that everything noblest and most passionate in human nature is
involved; and, despairing, as it were, of conveying to us in merely
human terms the implications of the strife between the two kinds of
ideals, he sets Aphrodite over against Athene, not merely Trojan against
Greek. But the _Iliad_ is, for all that, not myth nor a collection of
myths, but the story of the wrath of Achilles--a very human hero, who
loved his friend. The story of Baldur is myth--explaining and
interpreting, personifying and glorifying, a superhuman influence and
effect beyond the reach of human experience; the story of Siegfried is a
saga, a human experience, under whatever enlarged and idealized
conditions, yet still a type-experience of the human being. The garden
of Eden is myth-interpretation and explanation of many, some the
grimmest, facts of man's nature, and his relation to a supernatural
power; the story of Abraham is a saga--a typical history of human
experience, a typical picture of human culture. The whole artistic
purpose and effect of the hero-tale and the saga are different from
those of myth; the center of interest is a human being; the emphasis is
upon human life; the meaning is upon the surface. In true myth the
purpose is not artistic, but religious; the emphasis is upon superhuman
activities; the meaning is buried beneath symbols--the more beautiful
the myth, the more difficult and complex the symbol.
So one has almost to smile at the statement, commonly made that myth,
implying all myth, is childlike, and should therefore be given to little
children as literature, especially while they themselves are in the
mythopoeic age--presumably from four to seven. There are so many
fallacies in this statement that one pauses embarrassed at his many
opportunities of attack.
First as to the childlikeness of myth. There are, of course, undeveloped
races that have a naive and childish myth, but it is also so crude and
unbeautiful that it would never commend itself to one seeking artistic
material for children. The developed myths, those that have achieved the
elaboration of beautiful episodes, are most unchildlike. They are far,
far away from the crude guesses of the primitive mind. They have all
been worked over, codified, filled with theological and symbolistic
content by priests and poets. One can be very sure that no sensible
teacher who has mastered the material, would attempt to teach the whole
of any Hebrew or Greek or Scandinavian myth as myth within the
elementary period. If he takes one of the especially romantic or
beautiful episodes out of the myth, he is obliged to thin it out to the
comprehension of the children, and to mutilate it so as to make of it a
mere tale. When one reads Hawthorne's version of Pandora and Prometheus
and realizes the mere babble, the flippant detail, under which he has
covered up the grim Titanic story of the yearnings and strivings of the
human soul for salvation here and hereafter, the very deepest problems
of temptation and sin, of rebellion and expiation, he must see clearly
what is most likely to happen when a complex and mature myth is
converted into a child's tale. To make a real test, leave the alien
Greek myth and try the same process with one that we have built into our
own religious consciousness--the temptation and fall in the Garden of
Eden; a story, which is, by the way, much more naive in conception and
detail than that of Prometheus. We must conclude that such myths are not
childlike, and that to make such a version of them as will appeal to
the little child's attention and feeling gives but a shallow and
distorted view of them.
There should undoubtedly be a place in education for the study of myth
as religion and as an influence in human culture; should it not be
somewhere well within the adolescent period, when the symbols of the
great myths attract and do not baffle the child, when their religious
content finds a congenial lodging-place and a sympathetic interpretation
in his own experiences? It would seem only fair to reserve the beautiful
and reverential myths of the Greeks, Romans, and Scandinavians for this
period, rather than to use them in the age when there is little more to
appeal to than the tendency, so short-lived and shallow-rooted in the
modern child, to see personal agencies behind appearances. For this,
confused with a degree of grammatical uncertainty of speech, is
practically all that we can find under close analysis, of the mythopoeic
faculty in little children brought up under modern conditions.
There are still those, one discovers, who contend that myth should be
given to children as literature, because later in life--when they come
to read the _Aeneid_ in High School, or _Paradise Lost_ in college, or
_Prometheus Unbound_ or even Macaulay's essays--they will come upon
references to Zeus, to the fall of Troy, to the Titans, to Isis and
Osiris, and they ought to be able to call up from what they had as
literature in the elementary school such information as would enable
them to understand these allusions and fill out these references.
Luckily, the number of people who hold the fundamental theory of
education adumbrated in this view is becoming so rapidly smaller that
this chapter will, let us hope, be too late to reach them. The
multiplication table is a tool; the mechanics of reading and writing are
partially mere tools; but mythology, especially mythology substituted
for literature, can in no sense be regarded or treated as a tool.
Occasionally one meets the statement that myth, and mythical episodes,
are more imaginative than stories of human life, and should therefore be
given to little children as literature. So far as the persons who hold
this view can be pushed to definite terms, they mean either that the
conditions of ordinary human life are completely abrogated in mythical
stories, and that therefore they are more imaginative than stories of
mere human experience could be; or that the details given by the
imagination are arranged in some more unusual way--that there is less of
judgment and order in the arrangement than in stories of men and their
affairs.
Of course, we realize that the human mind cannot invent ultimate
details independent of experience. It is in the number and arrangement
of these details that originality inheres--that the varying quality or
quantity of imagination lies. Now, it is true that in mythical stories
the images, the details, are likely to be more numerous, and to be
arranged in a less orderly manner than in an art story; this is of the
nature of myth.
Ruskin, in _The Queen of the Air_, makes so clear a statement of this
principle that I shall borrow it for this chapter:
A myth in its simplest definition is a story with a meaning
attached to it other than it seems to have at first; and the fact
that it has such a meaning is generally marked by some of its
circumstances being extraordinary, or, in the common use of the
word, unnatural. Thus, if I tell you that Hercules killed a water
serpent in the lake of Lerna, and if I mean, and you understand,
nothing more than that fact, the story, whether true or false, is
not a myth. But if, by telling you this, I mean that Hercules
purified the stagnation of many streams from deadly miasmata, my
story, however simple, is a true myth, only, as, if I left it in
that simplicity, you would probably look for nothing beyond, it
will be wise in me to surprise your attention by adding some
singular circumstance; for instance, that the water-snake had
several heads, which revived as fast as they were killed, and which
poisoned even the foot that trod upon them as they slept. And in
proportion to the fulness of intended meaning I shall probably
multiply and refine upon these improbabilities; or, suppose if,
instead of desiring only to tell you that Hercules purified a
marsh, I wished you to understand [that he contended with envy and
evil ambition], I might tell you that this serpent was formed by
the goddess whose pride was in the trial of Hercules; that its
place of abode was by a palm tree; that for every head of it that
was cut off, ten rose up with renewed life; and that the hero found
at last he could not kill the creature at all by cutting its heads
off or crushing them, but only by burning them down; and that the
midmost of them could not be killed even in that way, but had to be
buried alive. Only in proportion as I mean more I shall appear more
absurd in my statement.
Is it fair to conclude that, if there is any ground for the statement
that myth is more imaginative than literature, it is either that it is
extremely symbolistic, constantly substituting one thing for another, or
that, not being art, it heaps up details profusely, unregulated by the
ordering and constructive side of the imagination? In the one case, it
would have small disciplinary value for the class; in the other, it
would be hopelessly beyond their comprehension; and in either case it
would not perform the characteristic service of literature.
There is much more to be said by those who feel that they find in the
mythic stories a large and vague atmosphere, a sort of cosmic stage
where things bulk large and sound simple, a great resounding room where
the children feel unconsciously the movement of large things. But this
is a religious mood. It is precisely the response we should like to have
when we tell our children the Hebrew myth of the creation--an emotional
reaction, vague but deep, to the dim and sublime images of the Days--a
response that constitutes itself forevermore a part of his religious
experience. If we are willing that he should have a similar reaction
upon the story of Zeus and the Titans, if we are willing that he should
lay this down, too, among the foundations of his religious life, by all
means tell it. But we can not quite fairly tell one to awaken a
religious response, and the other an artistic one.
This is all quite consistent with an utter repudiation of a hard and
fast "faculty" education. There are, of course, borders where myth and
literature inextricably intermingle, as there are certain effects of the
teaching of mythical episodes which are not to be distinguished from
those of the teaching of purely literary material. But the teacher
should clear up his mind upon this point; telling a romantic adventure
of a god is not teaching myth; telling a story of a hero in which the
gods take a share is not teaching myth, any more than the telling of the
story of the Holy Grail is teaching Christianity; symbolistic stories
whose setting happens to be Greek or Roman or Scandinavian are not myth.
It should not be difficult to handle for the children such stories as
contain a large amount of religious element. To have them get out of the
_Odyssey_ the characteristic and desirable effect, it is necessary to
give only a few words as to the offices of Athene and Poseidon in the
action, and then put the emphasis where Homer puts it--upon Odysseus,
his character and his experiences. It is no more necessary in reading
the _Odyssey_ to go into the myth of the divinities concerned, than it
would be in teaching _Hamlet_ to make an exhaustive excursus into the
pneumatology of the Ghost.
Now, there are a great many folk-tales that out of convention have taken
on as a sort of afterthought, as it were, an explanatory character. This
can be noticed in the charming Zuni folk-tales collected by Cushing.
Often the _pourquoi_ idea is appended in the final paragraph, a belated
bit of piety not at all inherent in the tale. Then there are, of course,
a great many fanciful _pourquoi_ tales, both folk and modern, whose
purpose was never more than playful. These cannot be seriously regarded
as myth, and must be estimated on their merits as stories.
It is hard to be so tolerant with the modern imitations of mythical
tales designed to render palatable and pretty facts in the life of the
world about us. One cannot believe much in the dew-fairies and
frost-fairies and flower-angels, speaking plants and conversing worms,
whose mission in life is really a gentle species of university-extension
lectures. Such stories are not literature; neither are they good
technical knowledge. Is it not true, as we shall elsewhere have occasion
to show, that, with our modern facilities for teaching the facts of
nature, we can make them attractive and impressive rather by showing
them as they are, than by attributing to them merely fanciful and often
petty personalities and genii?
Of course, in very advanced scientific theory we are driven again to
myth-making. One cannot speak of radio-activity except in terms of
personality, nor of the final processes of biology without using terms
implying purpose and choice. So does the wheel come full circle and all
our lives we are mythopoeists. But myth is not literature.
As has been intimated previously, it would seem that the time to teach
myth as myth is much later--perhaps within the secondary period, when it
can be examined as religion, or when the children have gained enough
experience, and developed enough dramatic imagination, to take hold of
it as a vital element in another culture. The place for the study of
the great symbolistic stories, whose background happens to be another
people's myth, such as King Midas, or Prometheus, or Apollo with
Admetus, should be, in any event, as late as the seventh grade, by which
time the children are able to look below the surface and begin to
understand the types and symbols of art.