A Book of Myths
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A
BOOK OF MYTHS
BY JEAN LANG
(MRS. JOHN LANG)
WITH SIXTEEN ORIGINAL
DRAWINGS IN COLOUR
BY HELEN STRATTON
THOMAS NELSON & SONS
NEW YORK
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
PREFACE
Just as a little child holds out its hands to catch the sunbeams, to
feel and to grasp what, so its eyes tell it, is actually there, so,
down through the ages, men have stretched out their hands in eager
endeavour to know their God. And because only through the human was
the divine knowable, the old peoples of the earth made gods of their
heroes and not unfrequently endowed these gods with as many of the
vices as of the virtues of their worshippers. As we read the myths of
the East and the West we find ever the same story. That portion of the
ancient Aryan race which poured from the central plain of Asia,
through the rocky defiles of what we now call "The Frontier," to
populate the fertile lowlands of India, had gods who must once have
been wholly heroic, but who came in time to be more degraded than the
most vicious of lustful criminals. And the Greeks, Latins, Teutons,
Celts, and Slavonians, who came of the same mighty Aryan stock, did
even as those with whom they owned a common ancestry. Originally they
gave to their gods of their best. All that was noblest in them, all
that was strongest and most selfless, all the higher instincts of
their natures were their endowment. And although their worship in time
became corrupt and lost its beauty, there yet remains for us, in the
old tales of the gods, a wonderful humanity that strikes a vibrant
chord in the hearts of those who are the descendants of their
worshippers. For though creeds and forms may change, human nature
never changes. We are less simple than our fathers: that is all. And,
as Professor York Powell[1] most truly says: "It is not in a man's
creed, but in his deeds; not in his knowledge, but in his sympathy,
that there lies the essence of what is good and of what will last in
human life."
The most usual habits of mind in our own day are the theoretical and
analytical habits. Dissection, vivisection, analysis--those are the
processes to which all things not conclusively historical and all
things spiritual are bound to pass. Thus we find the old myths
classified into Sun Myths and Dawn Myths, Earth Myths and Moon Myths,
Fire Myths and Wind Myths, until, as one of the most sane and vigorous
thinkers of the present day[2] has justly observed: "If you take the
rhyme of Mary and her little lamb, and call Mary the sun and the lamb
the moon, you will achieve astonishing results, both in religion and
astronomy, when you find that the lamb followed Mary to school one
day."
In this little collection of Myths, the stories are not presented to
the student of folklore as a fresh contribution to his knowledge.
Rather is the book intended for those who, in the course of their
reading, frequently come across names which possess for them no
meaning, and who care to read some old stories, through which runs the
same humanity that their own hearts know. For although the old worship
has passed away, it is almost impossible for us to open a book that
does not contain some mention of the gods of long ago. In our
childhood we are given copies of Kingsley's _Heroes_ and of
Hawthorne's _Tanglewood Tales_. Later on, we find in Shakespeare,
Spenser, Milton, Keats, Shelley, Longfellow, Tennyson, Mrs. Browning,
and a host of other writers, constant allusion to the stories of the
gods. Scarcely a poet has ever written but makes mention of them in
one or other of his poems. It would seem as if there were no get-away
from them. We might expect in this twentieth century that the old gods
of Greece and of Rome, the gods of our Northern forefathers, the gods
of Egypt, the gods of the British race, might be forgotten. But even
when we read in a newspaper of aeroplanes, someone is more than likely
to quote the story of Bellerophon and his winged steed, or of Icarus,
the flyer, and in our daily speech the names of gods and goddesses
continually crop up. We drive--or, at least, till lately we drove--in
Phaetons. Not only schoolboys swear by Jove or by Jupiter. The silvery
substance in our thermometers and barometers is named Mercury.
Blacksmiths are accustomed to being referred to as "sons of Vulcan,"
and beautiful youths to being called "young Adonises." We accept the
names of newspapers and debating societies as being the "Argus,"
without perhaps quite realising who was Argus, the many-eyed. We talk
of "a panic," and forget that the great god Pan is father of the word.
Even in our religious services we go back to heathenism. Not only are
the crockets on our cathedral spires and church pews remnants of
fire-worship, but one of our own most beautiful Christian blessings is
probably of Assyrian origin. "The Lord bless thee and keep thee....
The Lord make His face to shine upon thee.... The Lord lift up the
light of His countenance upon thee...." So did the priests of the
sun-gods invoke blessings upon those who worshipped.
We make many discoveries as we study the myths of the North and of the
South. In the story of Baldur we find that the goddess Hel ultimately
gave her name to the place of punishment precious to the Calvinistic
mind. And because the Norseman very much disliked the bitter, cruel
cold of the long winter, his heaven was a warm, well-fired abode, and
his place of punishment one of terrible frigidity. Somewhere on the
other side of the Tweed and Cheviots was the spot selected by the Celt
of southern Britain. On the other hand, the eastern mind, which knew
the terrors of a sun-smitten land and of a heat that was torture, had
for a hell a fiery place of constantly burning flames.
In the space permitted, it has not been possible to deal with more
than a small number of myths, and the well-known stories of Herakles,
of Theseus, and of the Argonauts have been purposely omitted. These
have been so perfectly told by great writers that to retell them would
seem absurd. The same applies to the Odyssey and the Iliad, the
translations of which probably take rank amongst the finest
translations in any language.
The writer will feel that her object has been gained should any
readers of these stories feel that for a little while they have left
the toilful utilitarianism of the present day behind them, and, with
it, its hampering restrictions of sordid actualities that are so
murderous to imagination and to all romance.
"Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn."
JEAN LANG.
POSTSCRIPT
We have come, in those last long months, to date our happenings as
they have never until now been dated by those of our own generation.
We speak of things that took place "_Before the War_"; and between
that time and this stands a barrier immeasurable.
This book, with its Preface, was completed in 1914--"_Before the
War._"
Since August 1914 the finest humanity of our race has been enduring
Promethean agonies. But even as Prometheus unflinchingly bore the
cruelties of pain, of heat and of cold, of hunger and of thirst, and
the tortures inflicted by an obscene bird of prey, so have endured the
men of our nation and of those nations with whom we are proud to be
allied. Much more remote than they seemed one little year ago, now
seem the old stories of sunny Greece. But if we have studied the
strange transmogrification of the ancient gods, we can look with
interest, if with horror, at the Teuton representation of the GOD in
whom we believe as a GOD of perfect purity, of honour, and of love.
According to their interpretation of Him, the God of the Huns would
seem to be as much a confederate of the vicious as the most degraded
god of ancient worship. And if we turn with shame from the Divinity so
often and so glibly referred to by blasphemous lips, and look on a
picture that tears our hearts, and yet makes our hearts big with
pride, we can understand how it was that those heroes who fought and
died in the Valley of the Scamander came in time to be regarded not as
men, but as gods.
There is no tale in all the world's mythology finer than the tale that
began in August 1914. How future generations will tell the tale, who
can say?
But we, for whom Life can never be the same again, can say with all
earnestness: "It is the memory that the soldier leaves behind him,
like the long train of light that follows the sunken sun--that is all
which is worth caring for, which distinguishes the death of the brave
or the ignoble."
And, surely, to all those who are fighting, and suffering, and dying
for a noble cause, the GOD of gods, the GOD of battles, who is also
the GOD of peace, and the GOD of Love, has become an ever near and
eternally living entity.
"Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be,
They are but broken lights of Thee,
And Thou, oh Lord, art more than they."
JEAN LANG.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _Teutonic Heathendom._
[2] John Kelman, D.D., _Among Famous Books_.
CONTENTS
PAGE
PROMETHEUS AND PANDORA 1
PYGMALION 11
PHAETON 16
ENDYMION 26
ORPHEUS 31
APOLLO AND DAPHNE 42
PSYCHE 46
THE CALYDONIAN HUNT 69
ATALANTA 78
ARACHNE 82
IDAS AND MARPESSA 90
ARETHUSA 100
PERSEUS THE HERO 105
NIOBE 124
HYACINTHUS 129
KING MIDAS OF THE GOLDEN TOUCH 134
CEYX AND HALCYONE 144
ARISTAEUS THE BEE-KEEPER 154
PROSERPINE 161
LATONA AND THE RUSTICS 169
ECHO AND NARCISSUS 174
ICARUS 181
CLYTIE 189
THE CRANES OF IBYCUS 192
SYRINX 197
THE DEATH OF ADONIS 202
PAN 209
LORELEI 220
FREYA, QUEEN OF THE NORTHERN GODS 227
THE DEATH OF BALDUR 234
BEOWULF 244
ROLAND THE PALADIN 266
THE CHILDREN OF LIR 289
DEIRDRE 306
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
"What was he doing, the great god Pan,
Down in the reeds by the river?" _Frontispiece_
PAGE
Then Pygmalion covered his eyes 12