Page:Grimm's Household Tales, vol.1.djvu/31

 regard the world in which they find themselves, and of what character are their myths?" Sir George Cox, however, leaves on one side and practically unnoticed all evidence except philological evidence as to the general habits of men in the same intellectual condition as his own makers of primary myths. Herein lies, we think, the original error of his system.

Instead of examining the natural history of savages to see how men like his primary myth-makers regard the universe, Sir George Cox describes the prevalence among mythopoeic men of what we must regard as a purely fanciful mental attitude. Sir George's myth-makers, as we have seen, lived in a tremulous and passionate sympathy with nature, and with the fortunes of the day and the year, of the dawn and the dew. "Perhaps for ages they could not believe that the sun would rise again in the morning." From every stage in the sun's progress the myth-makers derived thrilling excitement. They threw themselves with their whole souls into the love affairs and distresses of the dew. They mourned for the setting sun, "as for the loss of one who might never return."

Now does Sir George give any evidence, drawn from the natural history of man, for all this sentimental, yet sincere, primitive excitement about the processes of nature. None, or next to none. We do find summer-feasts and winter-fasts, rituals of regret and rejoicing for the coming and departing of summer among many races. Here and there (as in the Popol Vuh, an enigmatic, Quichua record) we see traces of anxious interest in the sun. Again, all savage races have nature-myths explanatory of the motions of the heavenly bodies—a rude sort of science. But as to this all absorbing, all-pervading tender and poetic habit of primitive sympathy with natural phenomena, we find no proof of it anywhere. Savages,