Page:Primitive Culture Vol 1.djvu/427

Rh she raised the lid of the great cask and shook out the evils that wander among mankind, and the diseases that by day and night come silently bringing ill; she set on the lid again and shut hope in, that evil might be ever hopeless to mankind. Shifted to fit a different moral, the allegory remained in the later version of the tale, that the cask held not curses but blessings; these were let go and lost to men when the vessel was too curiously opened, while Hope alone was left behind for comfort to the luckless human race. Yet the primitive nature of such legends underlies the moral shape upon them. Zeus is no allegoric fiction, and Prometheus, unless modern mythologists judge him very wrongly, has a meaning far deeper than parable. Xenophon tells (after Prodikos) the story of Herakles choosing between the short and easy path of pleasure and the long and toilsome path of virtue, but though the mythic hero may thus be made to figure in a moral apologue, an imagination so little in keeping with his unethic nature jars upon the reader's mind.

The general relation of allegory to pure myth can hardly be brought more clearly into view than in a class of stories familiar to every child, the Beast-fables. From the ordinary civilized point of view the allegory in such fictions seems fundamental, the notion of a moral lesson seems bound up with their very nature, yet a broader examination tends to prove the allegorical growth as it were parasitic on an older trunk of myth without moral. It is only by an effort of intellectual reaction that a modern writer can imitate in parable the beast of the old Beast-fable. No wonder, for the creature has become to his mind a monster, only conceivable as a caricature of man made to carry a moral lesson or a satire. But among savages it is not so. To their minds the semi-human beast is no fictitious creature, invented to preach or sneer, he is all but a reality. Beast-fables are not nonsense to men who ascribe to the lower animals a power of speech, and look on them as partaking