Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/383

 Rh took a first in Mods, and in Greats, securing election to a fellowship at Merton in 1868. From thence until his death his career was wholly that of a man of letters.

Other pens in other places have commented on his remarkable gifts as a writer, on his easily-worn equipment as a classical scholar, and on that marvellous versatility which "age could not wither nor custom stale," and to which a syndicate of assessors could do only bare justice. It would find ample business to hand in apportioning among its members a criticism of works, original and otherwise, filling sixteen pages of the British Museum catalogue. Here it must suffice to speak of his services to the twin sciences of folklore and comparative mythology. Invaluable as these services are to students of human psychology, the general public knows little, and cares little, about them, because the readers who looked to Andrew Lang for entertainment far outnumbered those who sought instruction from him. Even to some of the latter the pioneer work which he did in revolutionising accepted theories is but imperfectly known, since Custom and Myth was published as far back as 1884, and Myth, Ritual, and Religion in 1887,—the year before he was elected President of our Society, his membership of which dates from 1878, the year of its formation. For only those who were born two generations back can have memory of the stir made by Max Müller on the appearance of his article on "Comparative Mythology" in the Oxford Essays, 1856. His facile pen drew an attractive picture of the ancestors of the leading nations of Europe, and of certain peoples in Asia, dwelling on the Bactrian plateau, speaking a tongue and possessing a mythology which supplied the key to the language and traditions of the IndoEuropean races. That key, he argued, was found in tracing to their root-elements the names of Vedic gods and heroes, which were interpreted as natural phenomena, the sun, the dawn, and so forth. Hence was formulated that "solar theory" which so dominated us as to call from Matthew Arnold the humorous complaint that "one could scarcely look at the sun without having the sensations of a moth." Max Müller contended that the meaning of the name gave the clue to the meaning of the myth, and that the presence of coarse and grotesque features in the mythology of Hindu, Greek, Roman, and Teuton was mainly due to a