COMPARATIVE MYTHOLOGY FOR CHILDpEN.*

GREAT as was"rthd- impression produced by Dr. Mx Miiller's "Essay on :Cienpaiative Mythology" in the Oxfeiy/ -Etf.says, and sabsequeritlidsy the'. concluding lectures of the second series On the " Science-of Langtiage" devoted to the same subject, but few of hie

hearers or readers'ieem'to have so far taken his hints to heart as to follow out The fiam:e irivestigations independently, and help to

detertnine-the-newlace Which Mythology is henceforth to show us. Mr. Walter Kelly and Mr. Cox are the only Englishmen who have done personal "service by publishing independent works on the subject, as far:al we remember. Mr-. Cox's industry, however, makes up for the neglect of many other 'scholars who might have helped on'the same cause. Before publishing this more complete manual of :tht-TGreek Mythology, he had already published at

least three7t4eliiiting little books on select portions of the sub-

ject, told bi7iaitgliage of that rare beauty to which few have the key,—thelanguag,e Of 'elli/c/kaoci, net of the Pedagogue Condescending to' the -cliiki,z4 ford ' of speech" than -"lib ich : none Could be better fitted tothe Yiatilialnesi of tile childhood of the worldpoitraYed in than. In those .books;—and most"notibly in the Tales of the Gods itnd. Herois,—he could not refiainfrom 'addreising to older readeri,- in- a long intioduction;his ideas on the 'rise Of mYtho-

lcdiearboiidePtions, founded largely on the comparison of Greek with Sanskrit myths. Now his courage has waxed higher, and his new Manual of Mythology treats the whole subject of the Greek and Latin Mythologies, with short notices of those of other nations: and adopts Dr. Max Aliiller's system of interpretation (finding solar and oiiii*ar, day and night stories everywhere).

-1— In do doing he*Used the interpretation of the myths about Zeus, Eos, &c., first suggested by coMparison with their Vedic counterparts, Dyaes, Ushas, &c., as a key to unlock all the hid- den treasures of Greek Mythology. As soon as the names and functions of the gods of the Rig-Veda became known, many of them were found to coincide with the most surprising closeness

with 'Greek deities--Dyaus, Varuna, Ushas, Dahanft, with Zeus, Uranus,'Ebs; Daphne ; and to furnish the true interpretation of

the Greek- stories, inasmuch as where the Greek names were obsolete except as proper names, the Sanskrit names still retained their radical meaniug unforgotten.- Hence Mr. Cox unfolds'(in

his prefade)'his system of interpretation in the following words, admirablealike for their cogency and for their adaptation to the compreheniien of the young :—

"Noe,si-; long as men remained in the same place, there was no fear that the Words which they spoke AvEuild be misunderstood; but as timo went on they were scattered, and- seine wandered to the south, and some to the north and west ; and ,so-it came to pass that they kept the names which they gave to the sun, and the clouds and all other things, when their meaning had been almost or quite forgotten. In this way they still spoke of Phcebus as loving Daphne, after they had forgotten - that this meant only the Sun loves the Dawn.' So the name of the dew had been Procris, and it had been said that the Sun killed (dried up) the Dew as he rose in the sky ; but now Kephalos (Cephalus) became a man, who, without knowing it, killed a woman named Procris, ; whom he loved. Instead of saying any more that the Moon came to . see the Sun,die, they said that Seldne came to look on Endymion, or that Antigone soothed CEdipus in his last hour. Instead of saying that • the Sun was the child of darkness, they said that Phcebus was the son of Lets; and in place of the fairy network of Clouds, they spoke of the ; robe which Helios gave to the wise maiden Medea."

. But it will be said, only as referring to persons are these storha intellrgible. "Phcebus loves Daphne ;" translate Phcebus 'into the 'sun and Daphne into the dawn, and you still leave un- translated the verb loves, which can be predicated only of persons. To understand this we must believe with Mr. Cox (and indeed with most, if not all, mythologists) that men of the primeval times, •

• A Massuai of Mitholoiy, in the Form of Question and drawn By the Rey. ' GeOrje W. COI, MA. Landau: Lonruans. 1at;7.

"Knowing very little about themselves, and nothing at all of the things which they saw in the world around them, fancied that every- thing had the same kind of life which they had themselves. In this- way they came to think that the atm and stars, the rivers and streams, could see, and feel, and think, and that they shone or moved of their own accord. Thus they spoke of everything as if it were alive, and instead of saying, as we say, that the morning comes before the emir*, and that the evening twilight follows the sunset, they spoke of the Sin as the lover of the Dawn or morning, who went before him, as lough* to overtake her, and as killing her with his bright rays, which shone like spears So, too, when the Sun set, they said that the Dawn, with its soft and tender light, had come to soothe her son or her husband in his dying hour."

This, it need hardly be said, is demonstrated by the history of language, which really shows nothing abstract, nothing neuter, nothing without life, our most abstract terms being always trace- able to concrete sensuous notions and acts. And it is curious to notice that even where it would be thought the mythological al- legory would be most rigorously and contumeliously excluded, in the language of the 'exact sciences,' its language still lives ; if the axiom that "Nature abhors a vacuum" be obsolete, the Pressure of the Atmosphere is almost equally mythological. The truth is, that every action presupposes an agent ; and an agent is a power, and power implies life, and life introduces the con- ception of personality ; and thus the mythological conception is found after all to be natural, if not necessary. Only the con- ception of a greater Being behind all the phenomena, whose living' power works even in the apparently independent visible agents, can prevent separate mythological explanations of every fact of nature.

We consider, then, that the true explanation of many of the Greek stories has at last been found in the picture-speech about sun, moon, dawn, clouds, &c., which appears so plainly in the Vedas. It is, however, a serious question whether all the Greek stories of gods and heroes belong to that cycle of ideas. This can only, be determined by actual practice ; and this is perhaps the chief value of Mr. Cox's present book, that he has here applied this one key to all, and gained admission everywhere, in his own opinion ; it will be for others to find out whether he has pene- trated by it as far as he thinks. Dr. Max Miller, at all events, testifies :—

" I was really surprised at seeing how much progress has already been made in the interpretation of Greek myths. I had no doubt that we were working in tho right direction. . . . . . But I never saw so clearly before, that the main work is really finished."

On no point does Mr. Cox probably feel more strongly (for on none does he rise to such eloquence) than on the gain to morality and to our estimate of our race obtained by this allegorical solu- tion of the mysteries of mythology. The stories which seem coarse or ugly,

"Are so only because the real meaning of the names has been half forgotten or wholly lost. CEdipus and Perseus, we are told, killed their parents, but it is only because the sun was said to kill the darkness from which it seems to spring. So, again, it was said that the sun was united in the evening to the light from which he rose in the morning ; but in the latter story it was said that CEdipus became the husband of his mother Iocaste, and a terrible history was built up on this notion. But, as you see, none of these fearful or disgusting stories were ever- made on purpose. No one ever sat down to describe gods or great heroes as doing things which all decant men would be ashamed to think of. There can scarcely be a greater mistake than to suppose that whole nations were suddenly seized with a strange madness which drove them

to invent all sorts of ridiculous and contemptible tales. and that every nation has at some time or other gone mad in this way."

The last sentence supplies the necessary limitation to the pre- ceding. It is surely a very bold assertion that "no one ever sat down," &c. In the earliest ages, as well as now, there must have been individuals of low and sensed tastes, who would take par- ticular pleasure in doing the very thing here described. But they were individuals; and the mind of the nation is higher than that of its most corrupt members ; and the stories which the nation took up and transmitted from generation to generation, and which therefore must have expressed the general feeling, are found to be sound, true, and beautiful at the core, however foul their outer covering be.

We have only one word to say of Mr. Cox's book as a mytho- logical catechism intended for children. Being the first attempt to subject the whole Mythology to this new treatment, it is quite tentative, and, as even Muller (whose letter we read very differently from the writer in the,Athenteum) admits, contains some facts which "will probably have to be modified in later editions." Now school-books ought to deal with known facts only ; and this book does therefore seem rather premature. Perhaps this un- willing admission is forced upon us more vividly by the catecheti- cal form, which shows an intention to have the answers committed to memory by the child ; who tells us, for example, that the mune Zeus "is derived from the same roat with the Greek Theos and the Latin Dens, which both mean God,"—an assertion, by the way, by no means certainly true, especially as to Theos. Moreover, the child is not by nature, and ought not to be made, a contro- versialist. Adult persons, who have painfully emerged from the erroneous opinions of their youth to higher truth, know two schools of opinion, and become eloquent on the advance made by the new truth, as if it were equally an advance to every one else. But the child's mind not having been preoccupied with the old notions, the instructor can simply teach him the new, without confusing him by alluding to the old, which for him ought to be "bygones." Mr. Cox cannot altogether refrain from giving this parting kick to the old ideas of mythology, nor even from doing it by deputy, in the person of his catechumen, which seems to us rather an abuse of the innocence of childhood.

But if somewhat premature, this treatment of mythology is a bold attempt in the right direction. The truth told to children is apt, especially in our conservative and somewhat sluggish country, to lag far behind the actual height achieved by science. It may be acknowledged to be one of the most difficult problems in edu- eation to decide when the innovation is to be made, when the new ideas, which at first were heretical and controverted, become sufficiently established to be admitted into educational books. In England we put these questions off too long, until at length they have to be encountered boldly and hastily, as in the Public School Latin Primer. No sane man doubts the truths of geology, and very few try to harmonize them with the first chapter of Genesis ; yet few school-books, and probably not one intended for elemen- tary schools, could be found either to allude to the former, or not /simply to retail the latter. Mr. Cox, therefore, deserves the best thanks of educational reformers for his boldness in putting Mythology in the sort of dress it will wear to our children.