Mannhardt's friend, Mullenhoff, had an aversion to solar myths. He said:
{54} 'I deeply mistrust all these combinations of the new so-called
comparative mythology.' Mannhardt was preparing to study Lithuanian
solar myths, based on Lithuanian and Lettish marriage songs. Mullenhoff
and Scherer seem to have thought this work too solar for their taste.
Mannhardt therefore replied to their objections in the letter quoted in
part by Mr. Max Muller. Mannhardt was not the man to neglect or suppress
solar myths when he found them, merely because he did not believe that a
great many other myths which had been claimed as celestial were solar.
Like every sensible person, he knew that there are numerous real,
obvious, confessed solar myths _not_ derived from a disease of language.
These arise from (1) the impulse to account for the doings of the Sun by
telling a story about him as if he were a person; (2) from the natural
poetry of the human mind. {55} What we think they are _not_ shown to
arise from is forgetfulness of meanings of old words, which, ex
hypothesi, have become proper names.
That is the theory of the philological school, and to that theory, to
these colours, I see no proof (in the evidence given) that Mannhardt had
returned. But 'the scalded child dreads cold water,' and Mullenhoff
apparently dreaded even real solar myths. Mr. Max Muller, on the other
hand (if I do not misinterpret him), supposes that Mannhardt had returned
to the philological method, partly because he was interested in _real_
solar myths and in the natural poetry of illiterate races.