Page:Shinto, the Way of the Gods - Aston - 1905.djvu/90

80 not be confounded with the normal action of the imagination in the child, the savage, or the primitive (or, indeed, any other) myth-maker.

The inability to distinguish between imagination and fact is really not a special characteristic of the primitive man or savage, but of the literal-minded of all ages, in presence of the creations of imaginative genius. Some few primitive men may distinguish between the spiritual kernel and its imaginative envelopment. But for the multitude this is impossible. Unable to discriminate between these two elements, and dimly conscious that the whole is a valuable possession, they wisely accept it indiscriminately as actual fact.

De Gubernatis, in his 'Zoological Mythology,' relates a story which illustrates the respective attitudes of the myth-maker and his hearers. He tells us that "when he was four years old, as he was walking one day with a brother, the latter pointed to a fantastical cloud on the horizon, and cried, 'Look down there: that is a hungry wolf running after the sheep.' He convinced me so entirely of that cloud being really a hungry wolf that I instantly took to my heels and escaped precipitately into the house." Take, again, the following sun-myth, fresh coined from the mint of Mr. George Meredith:—

"The sun is coming down to earth, and the fields and the waters shout to him golden shouts. He comes, and his heralds run before him, and touch the leaves of oaks and planes and beeches lucid green and the pine stems redder gold: leaving brightest footprints upon thickly weeded banks, where the foxglove's last upper bells incline and bramble shoots wander amid moist herbage," &c.

This myth, like the old Greek tales of Prometheus and Tantalus, which Wordsworth calls

has a spiritual significance of which Mr. Meredith cannot