Read Ebook: The Contemporary Review Volume 36 October 1879 by Various

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A legislator, of course, ought not to guide his enactments by the morality of any one school. If, in Greek fashion, we were to set up an Epimenides, a Solon, a Lycurgus, as plenipotentiary to start us in a new course, there might be some little danger of one-sided and conceited morals; yet not much, even so; for a very one-sided or very stupid man would hardly be elected: every lawgiver wishes his new institutions to be permanent, and is sure to have some regard to the friction which they would encounter in working. But where the legislation must have sanction, not from one man, but from a thousand men, of whom six hundred are elected from different circles of mixed ranks, from diverse localities, where forms and schools of religion, based on variety of thought, prevail, it is evidently impossible that in the laws collectively approved any moral ideas should dominate, except those which are common to all who are morally cultivated. To dread moral considerations in the debates of an English Parliament, lest the morality prevailing in its laws become one-sided and arbitrary, pedantic and ascetic, is so baseless, so wanting in good sense, as scarcely to seem sincere. When people tell us, "We shall be liable to have laws against dancing and cardplaying, or laws compelling us to go to church, if we insist that legislation ought to study for the public virtue," they not only make themselves ridiculous, they even force us to suspect that they fear lest vice be repressed in ways inconvenient to the vicious. So much is premised, lest it be imagined or pretended that in pointing at moral limits to beneficial commerce any morality is desired less broad than that which all noble and well-reputed schools accept--the morals of mankind. At the same time, what is here advanced is intended to bear less immediately on law than on the general tenor of public opinion and practical writing.

Many economists write, as assuming that it is a step forward in civilization when a barbarous people learns artificial wants. If a New Zealander, instead of being satisfied with a mat for his back, which, made by himself, will last him for years, betakes himself to an English coat, which he must buy with a price,--which indeed less effectually shields him from wet, and sooner wears out,--he does that which is convenient to the English trader, but to him is a very doubtful gain: perhaps rather he brings on himself colds, cough, and consumption. If a thousand Maoris did the same, the commerce might figure in a Maori budget, and a Maori economist might point to the new trade as a step forward in national prosperity. The Zulus, as described by Englishmen who have travelled in Zululand or lived in the midst of them in Natal, are an upright, generous, faithful, honest race; and strange to say, Englishmen, who have such experience of them, are found to corroborate the utterance of Cetewayo, "A Zulu trained by a missionary is a Zulu spoiled"--that is, when trained in our habits they lose their national virtues. How can this be? why should it be? Apparently, because from us they learn artificial wants. While an apron suffices a Zulu for clothing, and a very simple hut for shelter, he can in many ways afford to be hospitable and generous. A man with very few wants has all the feelings of superfluity and wealth while surrounded by possessions so slender that we count him very poor: and when with an amount of toil which to his hardihood is not at all severe, he can always calculate on providing for himself and family all that their simple habits need, he is not deterred from present generosity by studying for his own future. But if he learn to covet and count necessary a number of articles which require from him threefold labour, he feels himself no longer rich, but poor; then, instead of giving small favours gratuitously, he claims to be paid for everything; instead of being princely, he becomes mercenary and stingy. If he imitate the dress, he is liable to envy the wealth of the Englishman, and in schemes of laying up for the future he easily becomes avaricious, perhaps fraudulent. Such are the steps by which one may justly calculate that some or many barbarians degenerate from the normal goodness of their fellows. The artificial wants which they learn when housed with our missionaries, or imbibe from the crafty allurements of traders, are not a benefit at all, do not conduce to independence, to the sense of wealth, nor to the practice of virtue. They are simply a convenience to the European trader. If a Maori or Zulu chief frown upon such trade, which judgment does he deserve--to be scolded as barbarous, or to be praised as sagacious? With them, perhaps also with us, to account but few things necessary is a foundation for many virtues. Our economists often reverse the picture.

No stress is here laid on the fact that the historical saints of Christendom thought it an excellence to be satisfied with a minimum of external appliances for the comfort of the body. So much of arbitrary opinion may be imputed reasonably to them, and so much of fancy and credulity to their biographers, that it does not occur to the present writer to account their practices or principles any support to his argument. But the case of Socrates, and many other Greek philosophers, is different, and much to the point. With them, high thought, cheap feeding, and mean circumstantials frequently went together; and perhaps even those philosophers, who were somewhat mercenary and rich, would vehemently have renounced the idea that it is a good thing to acquire habits and tastes which make necessary to us things previously needless. But there is danger of drawing the reader's thoughts into a new channel by this allusion to Greek philosophers when an argument of national economy is chiefly intended, not of personal virtues. As it is better for an individual to be satisfied with supplies that are sufficient, close at hand, and easy of attainment, than to have fastidious tastes which cannot be supplied without considerable effort and labour, so it is better for a nation to have a taste for its native products, so far as our lower wants are concerned. If we can get all that the health and strength of the body needs from our own soil, and with small expenditure, this is better for us than to be enslaved to artificial tastes, which multiply labours for mere bodily supply. To fix ideas, let me illustrate the principle here contained by discussing those popular beverages, tea and coffee.

Tea undoubtedly, as superseding beer, cider, and wine, has wrought much benefit to England, even if it have been dearer than our native intoxicants. When taken with little food, in strong and frequent cups, it may often have weakened the nerves; but it does not, like alcohol, pervert the brain and inflame the mind, thus leading to folly, vice, and crime. The present writer is, and always has been, a tea drinker; nor have the many assaults on this beverage which have been sent to him shaken his belief that, taken in moderation, it has no evil comparable to its good. The present argument does not aim to prove that tea is in itself bad, only that the too-exclusive addiction to it has hurtfully excluded the trial of native beverages, which are perhaps better, certainly cheaper, and far more accessible.

Rigid enemies of alcoholic drink often assure us, in poetical and ecstatic language, that water is the only reasonable and right drink for man, as for other animals; but the water which they recommend and describe as gushing and sparkling in mountain rills does not come to the hearth and home of every mountain dweller, much less is it attainable by the inhabitants of cities or boggy plains. The hardy beasts of the field, if they can get the water pure, manage to endure its coldness in all seasons; so perhaps might we, if we could recover robustness of the stomach without losing any advantage of a developed brain. That such recovery is impossible is not here asserted, but simply that, under the existing circumstances, the water often needs to be cooked, to be warmed, to have then some taste superadded which shall overcome mawkishness. When this is conceded, the question arises, will no native botany suffice? Are we of necessity driven to import tea from China or Assam? Such are the wonderful and deep harmonies of Nature that in each long-inhabited country the constitution of animals becomes adapted to its plants as well as to its climate, and finds among them not only its food, but its remedies for disease. Native herbs are often found more health-restoring than pretentious foreign drugs; nor is it extravagant to imagine that native leaves and berries might adapt themselves as well to the palate of Englishmen as tea and coffee, and better to their stomachs, if, instead of buying from the foreigner, we had duly studied our home resources. In the case of coffee, it curiously happens that there are persons among us who prefer what is called dandelion coffee to the coffee of Arabia; and that the preference is sincere seems proved by the accident that the dandelion thus prepared is dearer than the best Mocha. Nor does this dearness weigh against our argument. Twenty years ago brown bread was charged by bakers as fancy bread; ten years ago lentils were double their present price; in each case because the demand was so uncertain. The price of dandelion would quickly come down if it were in large and daily request. As substitutes for tea many leaves may be named which will not be called simply medicinal, prominently those of the sweet bay, the peach, and the black currant. If we were by any cause cut off from tropical markets, some combination would soon be discovered which carried off public preference; and when a national taste in it had once been established, every good purpose would have been attained without the foreign article. Should we not in that case moralize with wonder over the vast apparatus of great ships, which had been built, and manned, and stored, and sent to sea, with loss of sailors' lives, entailing widowhood and orphanhood, for no better reason than to bring back leaves, for which adequate substitutes abound at home? This argument undertakes not to prove, but to illustrate. It is not specially confined to the case of tea or coffee. It does not make positive assertion that we can now change the English taste, nor does it urge a transition which would be violent, if at all sudden. It merely points to reasonable probabilities, as showing that a vast trade with a distant country to gratify an artificial want, if it prove how much we can afford to spend without being ruined, yet does not at all prove that we enrich ourselves by the exchange. At the same time, so great is the facility for making drinks, that we might assume higher ground and press our argument farther. The deliciousness of Oriental sherbet is no matter of doubt or controversy. Its basis is simply barley-water; to flavour it, the foreigner, of course, uses some of his own fruits, but we have plenty of substitutes at hand, at least while sugar abounds to us. It may be warmed, if necessary: so little need we depend on the Chinese. Besides, some among us are satisfied with, and warmly applaud, the drink prepared from simple oatmeal. If we all had this taste, we should nationally be richer.

In other and greater matters a like topic recurs. When the controversy against the Corn Laws was at its height, the advocates of repeal were taunted with wishing to explode native wheat. They replied, "Wheat is now largely sown in England where the climate or soil is unfavourable; in such fields only, the culture will be discouraged; where it can be produced and ripened with greater certainty it will still be grown, and the price will no longer be forced up; the lands less suited to wheat may well yield, either some other grain in rotation, or other needful crop." Valid as this reply seemed, grand and glorious as are the results of opening our ports to foreign corn, the retrospect of thirty years nevertheless suggests new lines of thought. Want of food in Ireland when the potato crop failed was the argument which converted Sir Robert Peel; but the desire of selling cotton and woollen fabrics, or hardware, to those whose "chief coin" was wheat, gave an earlier impetus to the Anti-Corn Law League. Cobden and his associates were in the right, and performed well the task of the day; but the existing state of our agriculture is now discerned to be highly unsatisfactory. Every year widens and deepens the conviction that our laws of Land Tenure are fundamentally wrong; indeed, they are diverse from those of all the world; if they are not signally better than those of all other nations, they are gravely and lamentably worse; and the idea now presents itself, that the temporary relief given to us by the free importation of wheat has proved a buttress to an evil system of land laws, and has blinded us to the essential evils contingent on a perpetual increasing ratio of the population in great towns to that of the rustic districts. Much wealthier, no doubt, we are, and our poorer classes are less hard-worked. To dwell on the drawbacks through higher expectations, artificial wants, higher prices of coal, bricks, and houses--not to mention worse matters--might lead into too long digression. But, to bring out the idea here pointed at, we may speculate as to the results which must have followed, if no foreign markets had been able to give us permanent supplies of necessary food. Suppose that barely we had been able in 1847 to save from starvation as many poor Irishmen as we did save, but that in succeeding years the United Kingdom had been cast on its own resources for grain and cattle; will any one maintain that by a proper use of the land we could not have fed our own population?

If any one is of that opinion, let him consider the phenomena of French agriculture. A century ago France seemed unable to feed her inhabitants. Thousands of the population died of starvation, even the king's own servants. Misery among the peasants and the poorer classes in towns was universal. No one imagined that the country could afford to export food, or had any idea of its vast capacity of production. Her climate is not now superior to what it was; her area is somewhat enlarged by the sagacious plantings on dunes of sand; the soil is improved by a century's tillage; the produce is more valuable, because the peasants have been taught many secrets of fruit culture. Most important of all, millions of peasants are owners of small freeholds. The "magic of property" has made them industrious, saving and ever vigilant to increase and improve the crops. We in England censure and deplore the compulsion on a French parent to divide his petty freehold and his gains equally among his children. If this be a grave evil, yet so much the more remarkable are the marvellous results of the union in one man of landlord, farmer, and labourer: for we see that by the universal and untiring industry which this fact elicits, not only were the great extravagances of the Second Empire and its wars sustained, but, in spite of the scarcely calculable losses of the Franco-German war, the fine of two hundred and fifty millions sterling, which France had to pay, was paid within four or five years, while a larger army than ever was raised and maintained. No one can dispute that the unexampled buoyancy of French finance is due mainly to the sound conditions of French landed tenure. Ireland, Scotland, and England all await a similar development, and never can be satisfied without it: but we have postponed the day of necessary reform by buying our food of almost every kind, in dangerous amount, from foreign countries, while our own arable land goes back into grass and pasture.

F. W. NEWMAN.

FOOTNOTES:

"Reciprocity," by Sir Louis Mallet, C.B., 1879: Printed for the Cobden Club.

THE MYTHS OF THE SEA AND THE RIVER OF DEATH.

"A riddle which one shrinks To challenge from the scornful sphinx."

Some would dissuade us from the continuance of these unfruitful speculations; but it is very certain that man must change his nature before they will lose their fascination for him; and until he does so, he cannot read without sympathy the guesses which past generations of men have made towards the solution of the same problems. For them, indeed, these solutions have lost their interest, as ours will soon do for us. Whatever lot that new condition may hold in store, eternal pleasure or eternal pain, they have tried it now; whatever scene the dark curtain hides, they have passed behind it. This is very certain: as that we soon must. But so long as we remain here upon this upper earth, we must be something above or below humanity if we refuse ever to let our thoughts wander toward the changes and chances of another life.

Not, indeed, that questions of this sort have ever had for the majority of men in one age, or for the collective mass of human kind, an all-absorbing interest. If we choose to look closely into the matter, and to test men's opinion as it is displayed in their actions , we shall at first perhaps be struck by the slight belief which they possess in a future state. For it is slight compared to their "notional assent," that which they think they believe concerning it. With the majority, faith upon this point is at best but shadowy, of an otiose character suitable for soothing the lots of others, and sometimes, alas! called into requisition to relieve us from the stings of conscience on account of the pain which our own misconduct or neglect has introduced therein. And as it is with us, so, save under exceptional conditions, it has always been with men in the full vigour and enjoyment of life. There have been times when one aspect of the future--its terror--has been realized with an intensity, and has exercised an influence upon life and conduct, such as is unknown in our days. But these times have not been ordinary ones, and we are apt, I think, even to over-estimate the force of faith during the Middle Ages. That term, "dark ages," overrides our fancy; "we can never hear mention of them without an accompanying feeling as though a palpable obscure had dimmed the face of things, and that our ancestors wandered to and fro groping." But, then, neither have the most light-hearted and sceptical of people been able to shut their eyes utterly to the warnings of death. We are wont to think of the Greeks as of just such a light-hearted, and in a fashion sceptical, temperament, and to contrast the spirit of Hellas with the spirit of mediaeval Europe. Scarcely any thought of death, or of judgment after death, disturbs the serenity of Greek art, such as it has come down to us. Thanatos is not to be found; even the tombs are adorned with representations of war and of the chase, or with figures of the dancing Hours. And yet Greek art was not without its darker side. It had, like mediaeval poetry, its Dante--Polygnotus, namely--who adorned the pilgrims' house at Delphi with frescoes representing the judgment and the tortures of the damned,--a Greek Campo Santo. He would have given us a different impression of the Greek mind in presence of the fact of mortality, and shown us how easily we are led to exaggerate the divergence in thought between different nations and different times.

The same thought is expressed by the Hebrew poet,

"Sheol shall not praise thee, Jehovah, The dead shall not celebrate thee; They that go down unto the pit shall not hope for thy truth; The living, the living, shall praise thee, as I do this day."

In contrast therefore with all these myths stand those which, after death, send the soul upon a journey to some paradise, believed generally to lie in the west. If these first are myths of hell, the second series may be fairly described as myths of heaven. Nor can it be certainly proved that the more cheerful view of the other world is of a later growth in time than the first which seems so primitive. We see indications of it in the interments of old stone-age grave mounds. While among historical people the older Hebrews are the exponents of the gloomier Sheol, the most hopeful picture of the soul's future finds expression in the ritual service of the Egyptians. There we have a complete history of the dead man's journey across the Nile and through the twilight region of Apap, king of the desert, until at last it reaches the home of the sun. And, to come nearer home, among all those peoples with whom we are allied in blood, the Indo-European family of nations, we shall find the evidences of a double belief, the belief in death as of a dim underground place or as a devouring monster, and the contrasting faith in death as a journey undertaken to reach a new country where everything is better and happier than upon earth.

This is the myth of an earthly paradise, not, like our heaven, disconnected altogether from the world, but a distant land lying somewhere in the west, and forming part of the imaginary geography of those times: so the belief is, more than others, a realistic one, mingling with the daily experience of men and influencing deeply their daily life. The necessary portal of death is even sometimes lost sight of altogether, as when in the Middle Ages we find men undertaking more than one expedition in search of the earthly paradise, and when we find the current belief that in certain weathers was visible from the west coast of Ireland that happy island to which St. Brandon and his disciples had been carried when they left this world. For this reason, though the notion of the western paradise is essentially the same for all the human race, its local colouring constantly varies, changing with the geographical position of each people: if they change their homes and advance, as they will probably do, towards the land of promise, it moves away before them, as the rainbow moves from us. The Egyptians had their myth of the soul's journey, drawing all its distinctive features from the special character of their land, chiefly from the commanding influence which a great neighbouring desert exercised upon their imagination. But for our ancestors, the parents of the Indo-European races, the place of the desert was supplied by the sea.

The most probable conjecture has fixed the cradle of our race in that corner of land which lies westward the steep range of the Beloot Tagh mountains, an off-shoot of the Himalayas, and northward from the high barren land of Cabul. This country, the ancient Bactriana, is the most habitable district to be found anywhere in Central Asia. There the hills stretch out in gentle slopes towards the west, and enclose fertile valleys, whose innumerable streams, fed by the mountains east and south, all go to swell the waters of the Oxus, now called the Jihon. Farther north lies another fruitful country, watered by the Jaxartes, separated from the first by a range of hills much inferior to those which divide both lands from Yarkand and Cashgar on the east, and from Cabul on the south. Both the great rivers empty themselves into the Sea of Aral, between which and the Caspian, sharply cutting off the fertile country from that sea, stretches the Khiva desert, a barren land affording a scanty nourishment to the herds of wandering Turkic tribes. There is good reason to believe, however, that this desert did not always exist, but that in times not extraordinarily remote the Caspian Sea, joined to the Sea of Aral, extended over a much larger area than it at present covers: it is known even now to be sinking steadily within its banks. With such a contraction of the great sea the desert would grow by a double process, by the laying bare its sandy bed and by the withdrawal of a neighbouring supply of moisture from the dry land. So it may well have been that the fruitful territory wherein in remotest ages were settled our Aryan ancestors, stretched so far west as to border upon a large inland Asiatic sea. It has even been conjectured that the turning of so much fertile land into desert was the proximate cause of those migrations which sent the greater part of the Aryan races westward--to people, at last, all the countries of Europe. The root which is common to the European languages for the names of the sea, means, in the Indian and Iranian languages, a desert: how can we account for this fact better than by supposing that after the European nations had left their early home, their brethren, who remained behind and who long afterwards separated into the people of India and Persia, came to know as a desert the district which their fathers had once known as the sea?

"For many a day and many a dreadful night, Incessant labouring round the stormy cape;

of fatal rocks and the 'still-vexed Bermoothes;' of great whirlpools and the water-spout; of sunken ships and sumless treasures swallowed up in the unrestoring depths." We must not narrow the influence of the sea in mythology within the compass of man's mere experience of it. Few among the Aryans lived by the Caspian shore; but the Sea of Death appears in one form or another in the religious belief of all the Aryan people. The tradition of the sea, its real wonders, and greater fancied terrors, must have passed from one to another, from the few who lived within sight and sound of the waters to others quite beyond its horizon, to whom it was not visible even as a faint silvery line.

It is natural that, in early myths, no accurate distinction should have been drawn between the sea and rivers with which the Aryans were familiar. The Caspian was imagined a broad river bounding the habitable earth, the origin of the Oceanus of the Greeks; and the sea of death is, in its earliest form, a river of death. All after-forms of mythical geography, moreover, such as we find among Indians, Greeks, or Norsemen, are but graftings upon this central idea. As the Aryans changed their homes, the new experiences gradually blotted out the old. The Greek transferred his thoughts about the Caspian to the Mediterranean, and when his geography extended, the Oceanus was pushed farther and farther away, until the later Euhemerist geographers came to confound it with the Atlantic. Thus it is but by accident that we give to ocean the meaning which it now bears. The first ocean was the mythical river which flowed round the earth, and the real physical forerunner of the myth was not the Atlantic or any of our oceans, but the Caspian Sea as it stretched before the eyes of the ancient Aryan folk.

The Norseman, especially the Icelander, lived so close to the ocean, that the older myth was forgotten beside the aspect of nature so familiar to him. In the middle of his earth stood a high mountain, on which was a strong city, Asgaard, the house of the AEsir or gods. Below Asgaard lay the green and fruitful earth, man's home. Then outside flowed or lay the great mid-earth ocean, just like the Greek ocean in character, despite all differences of climate and country. At other times the mid-earth sea is personified as a devouring monster, J?rmungandr , the name of the mid-gaard serpent who lies at the bottom of the encircling sea, shaking the earth when he moves. Beyond, lies the ice-bound land of giants--J?tunheim, giant's home--dark like the Cimmerian land, and peopled with beings as weird and terrible as the Cyclops or the Gorgons.

From the belief in the river of death no doubt arose also the practice of committing the dead to the care of the sacred Ganges; for just as the Hindus kindle a funeral fire in the boat which bears the dead down this visible stream of death, so used the Norsemen to place their hero's body in his ship, and then having lighted it send it drifting out seawards with the tide. In conjunction with that thought of the other world which placed the final resting-place in a dark kingdom underground, the river is seen in Greek mythology transferred to Hades; but it is multiplied into four, which have all grown out of one, inasmuch as they were feigned to flow out of the upper-earth river Oceanus:--

"Abhorred Styx, the flood of deadly hate; Sad Acheron, of sorrow, black and deep; Cocytus named of lamentation loud Heard on the rueful stream; fierce Phlegethon Whose waves of torrent fire inflame with rage."

These pictures are not quite in character with the Hellenic thought about the future state. But it is certain that the more gloomy images of death are preserved in connection with the rivers of Hades, with Hades itself, and all that it contains. So it is with the northern Styx, Gj?ll, as it is called in the Eddas. This, too, is an underground stream lying, like the Indian, on the road to the gates of death.

Such beliefs are those which lie enshrined in the Odyssey. This poem is full of images of death, but they are not self-conscious ones, only mythical expressions first applied to the passage of the soul from life, and then made literal and physical by their transference to the unexplored western sea. What the Caspian may have been to the ancient Aryan, such was the Mediterranean to the Greek. The AEgean was his home-like water; there he might pass from island to island without losing sight of land; and he soon learnt to trust himself to its care, and to know its currents and its winds. Long before he had navigated beyond Cape Malea, all the coasts of the AEgean had become parts of his familiar world: outside this was the region of the unknown. The Iliad tells us what the early Greeks thought about the first. Myths may have mingled with the legend of the fall of Troy, but the story in Homer is essentially realistic, rationalistic even. The very powers of the immortals and their doings seem petty and limited. The Odyssey, on the other hand, is the product of the Greek imagination working in fields unturned by experience, free from any guiding impulse of knowledge; and here step in those monstrous shapes and strange adventures which differ altogether from the probable events of the Iliad. We feel at once that we are in a new world, a world not so much of supernatural beings as of magic; lands of glamour and illusion, most like the giant-land of the Norsemen; for we are getting towards the twilight regions of the earth and the borders of Hades.

Some writers have attempted to explain the Odyssey as nothing more than a myth of the sun's course through heaven. But surely there is too much solidity about the story, too thorough an atmosphere of belief around it, to suit a tale relating such airy unrealities as those. The Greeks who first sung the ballads must have been thinking of a real journey upon this solid earth. But it is easy to see how many images and notions which had first been applied only to the sun-god would creep into such a history as that of Odysseus. Undoubtedly the sun-myth had first pointed out the home of the dead as lying in the west; and nothing is more natural than that a people whose thoughts and hopes carried them in the track of the wandering sun should, when they came to construct an epos of travel, make the imaginary journey lie the same way. They would interweave in the story such truths--or such sailors' yarns--as Phoenician mariners or adventurous Greeks brought home from the distant waters, with many images which had been first made of the sun's heavenly voyage, and others which had been first applied to death. Their geography would, indeed, be mythical; for they could have no accurate notions of the lands which they spoke of; but it would not be without a kernel of reality. Justin and Augustine may look upon the garden of the Hesperides or the garden of Alcino?s as a reminiscence of Paradise; Strabo may assign them an exact position on the coast of Libya; and both may be right. The myth of the two gardens--the Hebrew and the Greek paradises--sprang up in obedience to an identical faculty of belief, and therefore the two stories are in origin the same. But each myth supported itself upon so much of reality as it could lay hold of: and it is likely enough that the famous golden apples which Hercules was sent to fetch owed their origin to the first oranges brought by Phoenician merchantmen to Greece.

Besides some such slender thread of reality, the adventures of Odysseus are built upon what men's imagination told them might lie in the western seas. Now in reality there was only one thing which at the bottom of their hearts they believed actually did lie there--namely, death; and beyond that, the home of the departed. Therefore their stories of adventure in the Mediterranean do all, upon a minute inspection, resolve themselves into a variety of mythical ways of describing death; and upon this as a dark background the varied colours of the tale are painted. It need take away no jot of our pleasure in the brilliant picture to acknowledge this. Nay, it gather adds to it, for behind the graceful air of the poem, sung as a poem only, we hear a deeper note telling of the passionate, obstinate questionings of futurity which belonged not more to Greece three thousand years ago than they now belong to us.

"Wind-like beneath, the immortal golden sandals Bare up his flight o'er the limitless earth and the sea; And in his hand that magic wand he carried, Wherewith the eyes of men he closes in slumber, Or wakens from sleeping."

He comes like the breath of morning awakening the world, to rouse our hero from the embrace of death; and the whole scene is beautifully attuned to an image of returning life. Therefore the interference of Hermes between Odysseus and Calypso is full of significance. We accordingly meet the same episode in the Circe tale. That this last is a later widening of the first story appears from many things; chiefly in this, that there is more moral in the history; for the truest myth is content to follow the actual workings of nature, without attempting to adorn a story with extraneous incident, or to convert its simplicity into the complexities of allegory. That turning the companions into swine was a punishment for luxury--that points the moral; the original Circe, we may be sure, only touched her lovers with her sleepy magic rod. It was the same wand with the "slepy yerde" of Hermes, and she used it not wantonly but only because all whom she embraces must fall into the unwakeful slumber. If Circe's name does not reveal her nature so nakedly as Calypso's does, this is but consistent with the fact of her later creation. Nevertheless, we easily recognise by it death in one of its many types--a ravenous animal or bird, a hawk or wolf.

When Odysseus is freed from the fatal embrace of Calypso, he is not at once restored to the common earth, but from his descent into hell goes heavenwards, or at least to the happy islands of the blessed. The land of the Phaeaceans, Scheria, can scarcely be anything else than this Paradise, to which, according to one myth, Rhadamanthus fled from his brother Minos when he reigned in Crete. The Phaeaceans, too, have had dealings with "yellow-haired Rhadamanthus," whom they carried back in their swift barques to Euboea. The name of their island is merely land, shore; perhaps at first only the farther coast of the sea of death.

"Far away do we live at the end of the watery plain, Nor before now have we ever had dealings with other mortals; But now there comes some luckless wanderer hither. Him it is right that we help; for all men, fellows and strangers, Come from Zeus; in his sight the smallest gift is pleasing."

"That from one window men beheld the spring, And from another saw the summer glow, And from a third the fruited vines arow."

In name the Phaeaceans appear as beings of the twilight--?????, strengthened from ?????, dusky, dim. Their most wondrous possessions are their ships, which know the thoughts of men, and sail swifter than a bird or than thought. "No pilots have they, no rudders, no oarsmen, which other ships have, for they themselves know the thoughts and minds of men. The rich fields they know, and the cities among all men, and swiftly pass over the crests of the sea, shrouded in mist and gloom." Yet the Phaeaceans themselves live remote from human habitation, unused to strangers. It would seem, therefore, that the ships travel alone on their dark voyages. For what purpose? It is not difficult to guess. Their part is to carry the souls of dead men over to the land of Paradise. We can imagine them sailing in every human sea; calling at every port, familiar with every city, though in their shroud of darkness they are unseen by men. They know all the rich lands, for every land has its tribute to pay to the ships of death. They are the exact counterparts of the "grim ferryman which poets write of;" only that the last plies his business in the ancient underground Hades, while the Phaeacean mariners are really believed to be inhabitants of the upper earth; albeit they can pass from this life to the other.

Baldur is quite evidently the sun-god. Less of a hero, more of a god, than Odysseus, he is nevertheless mortal--as, indeed, all the Norse gods are--and falls pierced by the hand of his own brother, H?dur. Then his corpse is placed upon his ship, Hringhorn, and sent out upon this, as on a pyre, drifting into the ocean. We can imagine how to the Norsemen upon their stormy seas, the image of the sun dying red upon the western waters recalled the story of Baldur's burning ship. The Viking imitated his god in this, and when his time came ordered his funeral fire to be lighted in like manner upon a ship and himself to be set sailing, as Baldur was. After this we are brought in the myth to the underground kingdom of Hel, and there the goddess entertains Baldur, as Calypso entertained Odysseus, making ready her best to do him honour, and seating him in the highest place in her hall. Then the gods take counsel how Baldur is to be brought back again, and one of them, Herm?dr, the messenger, like Hermes, is sent to beg Hel to let Baldur out of Helheim. Fate and death are more powerful in northern lands than they are in Greece. The gods cannot command that this Calypso should let her prisoner go; and alas! they do not even obtain an answer to their prayer save on conditions which they are unable to fulfil. Hel will set Baldur free, if all things, both living and dead, weep for him; but if one thing refuses to weep, then he must remain in the under-world. Thereupon the gods sent messengers over the whole earth, commanding all things, living and lifeless, to weep Baldur out of Helheim; all things freely complied with the request, both men and stones, and trees and metals; until as the messengers were returning, deeming that their mission was accomplished, they met an old witch sitting in a cave, and she refused to weep, saying, "Let Hel keep her own." This old witch is Calypso or Circe in another guise. Her name is Thokk, that is, darkness .

The Teutonic people had many myths and stories about the carrying the dead across the sea. We have signalized the belief in such a passage as the origin of those countless mediaeval legends of the earthly Paradise: doubtless it is the parent of the modern superstition that ghosts will not cross the running water. Side by side with the story of the Phaeaceans we may place the superstition which Procopius records touching our own island. The Byzantine historian of Justinian seems to have had but vague ideas of the position of Britain, which, by the tide of Teutonic invasion across the Rhine, had long been cut off from intercourse with the Empire. These Easterns were careless and ignorant of the remote West. So Procopius speaks of Britannia as lying opposite to Spain; and then he mentions another island, Brittia--evidently in reality our island--which faces the northern coast of Gaul, and of this he tells the following strange story:--There is, he declares, an island called Brittia, which lies in the Northern Seas. It is separated into two divisions by a wall; and on one side of this wall the air is healthy and the land fertile and pleasant, and all things most apt for human habitation. But on the other side the air is so noxious that no one can breathe in it for an hour: it is given up to serpents and poisonous animals and plants. Yet not entirely; for this is the home of the dead. Then he goes on to relate how the fishermen who inhabit the coast opposite this part of Brittia have to perform the strange duty of carrying the souls across the strait. Each does his office in rotation; when the man's night has come he is awoke by a knocking at his door, but when he opens it, sees no one. He goes down to the shore, and finds there strange vessels, which, though empty to mortal eyes, lie deep in the water as though weighed down by some freight. Stepping in, each fisherman takes his rudder, and then by an unfelt wind the vessels are wafted in one night across the channel, a distance which, with oar and sail, they could usually scarce accomplish in eight. Arrived at the opposite side--our coast--the fishermen heard names called over and voices answering in rota, and they felt the boats becoming light. Then, when all the ghosts were landed, they were carried back to Gaul. We may picture them returning to the habitable world in the first glow of morning, or with the one bright morning star which shone on Odysseus landing at Ithaca.

Evidently, therefore, even the inanimate things, the weapons and treasures which are burnt with the dead, survive in a land of essences for the use of the liberated soul. To the question, Where does man's essence go to when it rises from the funeral fire? the answer, if the wish alone urged the thought, would be "To the gods." But with the majority of burying people the belief in future union with the gods was not strongly insisted upon. The islands of the blest are certainly not to be confounded with Olympus; although the Phaeaceans claim to live very near the gods. Yet with the use of burning, and among the Aryan people, the hope gains a measure of strength. The gods of the Aryan were, before everything, gods of the air. As the soul and the smoke mounted upwards, "curled to the clouds," the belief of its having gone to join the gods--chief god, Dy?us, the air--was impressed more vividly upon his mind. And as the notion of the western journey to the home of the sun was not abandoned, a natural compromise would be to send the soul upwards to the path of the sun, and make its voyage a voyage in heaven, led by the sun or by the wind. But his path still lay westward; the home of the dead ancestors lay beyond the western boundary; there was still an Oceanus to be crossed, and a dark Cimmerian land to be passed through.

"A narrow path, an ancient one, stretches there, a path untrodden by men, a path I know of:

"On it the wise who have known Brahma ascend to the world Svarga, when they have received their dismissal," sings a Sanskrit poet.

Another prays the Maruts, the gods of the wind, not to let him wander on the path of Yama, or, when he does so--that is, when his time shall come--to keep him that he fall not into the hands of Nirrtis, the Queen of Naraka . In another place we find as guardians of the bridge two dogs, the dogs of Yama, and the dead man is committed to their care:--

"Give him, O king Yama, to the two dogs, the watchers, the four-eyed guardians of the path, guardians of men: grant him safety and freedom from pain."

Thus stands out in its complete development the myth of the Bridge of Souls: a narrow path spanning the arch of heaven, passing over the dwelling of Nirrtis, the Queen of Tartarus , and reaching at last the country of the wise Pitris, the "fathers" of the tribe, who have gone to heaven before, and who since their death have not ceased to keep watch over the descendants of their race. This road is guarded by two dogs, the dogs of Yama, both wardens of the bridge and likewise psychopomps, or leaders of the soul up the strait road.

"Death comes to set thee free; Oh, meet him cheerily As thy true friend."

Still, as we see from their appearance, the dreadful aspect of death predominates. In like forms, as dogs or wolves, they return time out of mind in Norse mythology and in Middle-Age legend.

It has been said that this myth of the Bridge of Souls was essentially Indian and Iranian . It is often most difficult to ascertain what were the ancient Persian beliefs: but in this case the myth has been handed down to us from the Persians through the Arabs, a people possessing of right no part or lot in its construction. It is generally acknowledged that Mohammed took from the Persians that famous bridge so vividly described in the Kor?n. Es-Sir?t is the bridge's name. It is finer than a hair and sharper than the edge of a sword, and is, besides, guarded with thorns and briars along all its length. Nevertheless, when, at the last day, the good Muslim comes to cross it, a light will shine upon him from heaven, and he will be snatched across like lightning or like the wind; but when the wicked man or the unbeliever approaches, the light will be hidden, and, from the extreme narrowness of the bridge and likewise becoming entangled in the thorns, he will fall headlong into the abyss of fire that is beneath. This is the fragment of our old Aryan mythology which the Mohammedan has taken to himself to form an image of hell and of punishment after death. It is significant that from the Persians should have been inherited the most gloomy myth concerning the Bridge of Souls. For from the same source we gain our fearfullest notions of the Devil.

The bridge cannot be always the Milky-way. In at least one Sanskrit hymn we learn--

"Upon it, they say, there are colours, white, and blue, and brown, and gold, and red.

"And this path Brahma knows, and he who has known Brahma shall take it; he who is pure and glorious."

It is possible that a trace of the rainbow bridge is to be seen in the Greek myth of the asphodel meadows, which are a part of the infernal regions. But no other trace of the Bridge of Souls--if this be one--is to be found throughout the range of Hellenic mythology.

A gentler legend is that which we find preserved in a charming poem of the Swede, Torpelius, called "The Winter Street"--another of the names for the Milky-way. With this, in the form in which it has been rendered into English, we may end our list of legends connected with the Sea of Death or the Bridge of Souls. The story is of two lovers:--

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