THE GRECIAN MYTHICAL VEIN COMPARED WITH THAT OF MODERN EUROPE.
Μῦθος—_Sage_—an universal manifestation of the human mind.—Analogy of the Germans and Celts with the Greeks.—Differences between them.—Grecian poetry matchless.—Grecian progress self-operated.—German progress brought about by violent influences from without.—Operation of the Roman civilization and of Christianity upon the primitive German mythes.—Alteration in the mythical genealogies—Odin and the other gods degraded into men.—Grecian Paganism—what would have been the case, if it had been supplanted by Christianity in 500 B. C.—Saxo Grammaticus and Snorro Sturleson contrasted with Pherekydês and Hellanikus.—Mythopœic tendencies in modern Europe still subsisting, but forced into a new channel: 1. Saintly ideal; 2. Chivalrous ideal.—Legends of the Saints—their analogy with the Homeric theology.—Chivalrous ideal—Romances of Charlemagne and Arthur.—Accepted as realities of the fore-time.—Teutonic and Scandinavian epic—its analogy with the Grecian.—Heroic character and self-expanding subject common to both.—Points of distinction between the two—epic of the Middle Ages neither stood so completely alone, nor was so closely interwoven with religion, as the Grecian.—History of England—how conceived down to the seventeenth century—began with Brute the Trojan.—Earnest and tenacious faith manifested in the defence of this early history.—Judgment of Milton.—Standard of historical evidence—raised in regard to England—not raised in regard to Greece.—Milton’s way of dealing with the British fabulous history objectionable.—Two ways open of dealing with the Grecian mythes: 1, to omit them; or, 2, to recount them as mythes.—Reasons for preferring the latter.—Triple partition of past time by Varro. 461-489
The mythical world of the Greeks opens with the gods, anterior as well as superior to man: it gradually descends, first to heroes, and next to the human race. Along with the gods are found various monstrous natures, ultra-human and extra-human, who cannot with propriety be called gods, but who partake with gods and men in the attributes of free-will, conscious agency, and susceptibility of pleasure and pain,—such as the Harpies, the Gorgons, the Grææ, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, Echidna, Sphinx, Chimæra, Chrysaor, Pegasus, the Cyclôpes, the Centaurs, etc. The first acts of what may be termed the great mythical cycle describe the proceedings of these gigantic agents—the crash and collision of certain terrific and overboiling forces, which are ultimately reduced to obedience, or chained up, or extinguished, under the more orderly government of Zeus, who supplants his less capable predecessors, and acquires precedence and supremacy over gods and men—subject, however to certain social restraints from the chief gods and goddesses around him, as well as to the custom of occasionally convoking and consulting the divine agora.