Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Third Supplement.djvu/347

 forms, among widely distant races; he also observed that while they differed little in their incidents they differed entirely in their names. He concluded that the key to these analogies could not be language, and that the philological explanations, then fashionable, must be wrong. He announced this discovery in the Fortnightly Review, May 1873, in an article, Mythology and Fairy-tales, which has been described as ‘the first full refutation of Max Müller's mythological system, and the first full statement of the anthropological method applied to the comparative study of myths’ [Quarterly Review, April 1913, p. 311]. Custom and Myth was followed in 1887 by Myth, Ritual, and Religion. This deals chiefly with totemism, the importance of which in early human society Lang tended in his later works to minimize. He came to believe that the seeds might be found in primitive races of another source of rules, of ‘a faith in a Creator and Judge of men’. This view was first systematically stated in The Making of Religion (1898), and so firmly held that the second edition of Myth, Ritual, and Religion (1899) was drastically handled in order to square with it. Lang's monotheistic heresy, as it was called, involved him in much controversy and some temporary disrepute; the biblical quotations and Hebraic parallels by which it was supported gained him, at the same time, the unwelcome applause of orthodox believers in the legends of Genesis. The misunderstanding was increased by his unprofessional attitude towards miracles. He had always been interested in abnormal psychology: he was one of the founders of the Psychical Research Society, and its president in 1911. He now appealed to its evidence to account for those miraculous phenomena from which religion in all ages has derived support, and which he refused to regard as necessarily fraudulent. ‘A little more of that’, said a French confrère, ‘and M. Lang may be ranked among the Church Fathers!’ It is acknowledged that Lang did a service, even at the expense of admitting ‘degradation’, by recalling attention to some higher elements in savage beliefs which the doctrine of evolutionary progress had led inquirers to neglect. It seems probable, nevertheless, that Lang's earlier work in anthropology was also his best, and that his greatest performance was his first, when he proved that folk-lore is not the debris of a higher or literary mythology, but the foundation on which that mythology rests. ‘He who demonstrated that’, wrote M. Salomon Reinach, ‘and made it a key to the darkest recesses of classical mythology, has conferred a benefit on the world of learning, and was a genius.’

Lang was a Greek scholar, devoted to Homer. S. H. Butcher and Lang's prose translation of the Odyssey (1879), preceded by Lang's best sonnet, was one of the famous and even formative books of its time. The translation of the Iliad, which followed (1883), by Lang, Walter Leaf, and Ernest Myers, was less good, but still notable. He published, also, translations of Theocritus (1880) and of the Homeric Hymns (1899), the first perhaps his best translation, the second remarkable for the excellent essays which accompanied it. He was one of the principal champions of the personality of Homer and of the unity of his poems (even writing a sonnet on Homeric Unity), and to the Homeric question he contributed three books: Homer and the Epic (1893), Homer and his Age (1906), and, best of the three, The World of Homer (1910). He did excellent service, in a light-armed, raiding way, by exposing the more childish methods of the orthodox separatists, and the rather comical inadequacy of some of their tests. There were more self-contradictions, he pointed out, in Pendennis than in the Iliad. His wit and high spirits, his knowledge of anthropology, and his wide range of literary illustration made him an invaluable ally; and if the unitarian minority to which he belonged is now in the ascendant, he must share the credit.

Lang was a considerable historian. He had dabbled, as a young man, in the mysteries of Scottish history, yet his first historical work, a history of St. Andrews (1893), was a confessed piece of bookmaking, and he was nearly fifty when it appeared. It gave much offence, for Lang was frank about the Reformation, and careless errors in the book were triumphantly exposed. The experience was salutary, and an accident of friendship tempted him to profit by it. R. L. Stevenson had asked ‘dear Andrew’ for something about the Jacobites, and Lang, in the course of searching, was caught up by a historical mystery—Who was the Jacobite spy referred to by Scott in the introduction to Redgauntlet? He sent what he had found to Samoa, and on Stevenson's death in 1894 the papers were returned to him. His curiosity revived, and the result was Pickle the Spy (1897). The spy, he decided, was Alastair Ruadh Macdonell [q.v.], ‘Young Glengarry’, and now from another quarter his Scottish 321