Page:Decline of the West (Volume 2).djvu/301

Rh court must have been familiar with it. We may attach any implications we please to "belief" (whatever that may mean) in this myth; the point is that they will be as valid for Romans of the period of the Kings as for the inhabitants of Tegea or Corcyra.

That the pictures of Greek and Roman mythology that modern research has developed are quite different from this is the result not of the facts, but of the methods. In the case of Rome (Mommsen) the festal calendar and the State cults, in that of Greece the poetic literature, were taken as the starting-points. Apply the "Latin" method which has led up to Wissowa's picture to the Greek cities, and the result is a wholly similar picture, as, for example, in Nilsson's Griechische Festen.

When this is taken into consideration, the Classical religion is seen to be a whole possessing an inner unity. The grand god-legends of the eleventh century, which have the dew of Spring upon them, and in their tragic holiness remind us of Gethsemane, Balder's death, and Francis, are the purest essence of "theoria," contemplation, a world-picture before the inner eye, and born of the common inward awakening of a group of chosen souls from the world of chivalry. But the much later city-religions are wholly technique, formal worship, and as such represent only one side (and a different side) of piety. They are as far from the great myth as they are from the folk-belief. They are concerned neither with metaphysic nor with ethic, but only with the fulfilment of sacral acts. And, finally, the choice of cults by the several cities very often originated, not, like the myth, from a single world-view, but from the accidental ancestor- and family-cults of great houses, which (precisely as in the Gothic) made their sacred figures the tutelary deities of the city and at the same time reserved to themselves the rights of celebrating and worshipping them. In Rome, for example, the Lupercalia in honour of the field-god Faunus were a privilege of the Quinctii and Fabii.

The Chinese religion, of which the great "Gothic" period lies between 1300 and 1100 and covers the rise of the Chóu dynasty, must be treated with extreme care. In presence of the superficial profundity and pedantic enthusiasm of Chinese thinkers of the Confucius and Lao-tse type — who were all born in the ancien régime period of their state-world — it seems very hazardous to try to determine anything at all as to high mysticism and grand legends in the beginning. Nevertheless, such a mysticism and such legends must once have existed. But it is not from these over-rationalized philosophies of the great cities that we shall learn anything about them — as little as Homer can give us in the Classical parallel, though for another reason. What should we know