The question of the precise attitude of Professor Tiele, the accomplished
Gifford Lecturer in the University of Edinburgh (1897), is more important
and more difficult. His remarks were made in 1885, in an essay on the
Myth of Cronos, and were separately reprinted, in 1886, from the 'Revue
de l'Histoire des Religions,' which I shall cite. Where they refer to
myself they deal with Custom and Myth, not with Myth, Ritual, and
Religion (1887). It seems best to quote, ipsissimis verbis, Mr. Max
Muller's comments on Professor Tiele's remarks. He writes (i. viii.):
'Let us proceed next to Holland. Professor Tiele, who had actually been
claimed as an ally of the victorious army, declares:--"Je dois m'elever,
au nom de la science mythologique et de l'exactitude . . . centre une
methode qui ne fait que glisser sur des problemes de premiere
importance." (See further on, p. 35.)
'And again:
'"Ces braves gens qui, pour peu qu'ils aient lu un ou deux livres de
mythologie et d'anthropologie, et un ou deux recits de voyages, ne
manqueront pas de se mettre a comparer a tort et a travers, et pour tout
resultat produiront la confusion."'
Again (i. 35):
'Besides Signer Canizzaro and Mr. Horatio Hale, the veteran among
comparative ethnologists, Professor Tiele, in his Le Mythe de Kronos
(1886), has very strongly protested against the downright
misrepresentations of what I and my friends have really written.
'Professor Tiele had been appealed to as an unimpeachable authority. He
was even claimed as an ally by the ethnological students of customs and
myths, but he strongly declined that honour (1. c., p. 31):-
'"M. Lang m'a fait 1'honneur de me citer," he writes, "comme un de ses
allies, et j'ai lieu de croire que M. Gaidoz en fait en quelque mesure
autant. Ces messieurs n'ont point entierement tort. Cependant je dois
m'elever, au nom de la science mythologique et de 1'exactitude dont elle
ne peut pas plus se passer que les autres sciences, contre une methode
qui ne fait que glisser sur des problemes de premiere importance," &c.
'Speaking of the whole method followed by those who actually claimed to
have founded a new school of mythology, he says (p. 21):--
'"Je crains toutefois que ce qui s'y trouve de vrai ne soit connu depuis
longtemps, et que la nouvelle ecole ne peche par exclusionisme tout
autant que les ainees qu'elle combat avec tant de conviction."
'That is exactly what I have always said. What is there new in comparing
the customs and myths of the Greeks with those of the barbarians? Has
not even Plato done this? Did anybody doubt that the Greeks, nay even
the Hindus, were uncivilised or savages, before they became civilised or
tamed? Was not this common-sense view, so strongly insisted on by
Fontenelle and Vico in the eighteenth century, carried even to excess by
such men as De Brosses (1709-1771)? And have the lessons taught to De
Brosses by his witty contemporaries been quite forgotten? Must his
followers be told again and again that they ought to begin with a
critical examination of the evidence put before them by casual
travellers, and that mythology is as little made up of one and the same
material as the crust of the earth of granite only?'