Die Griechischen Culten und Mythen in ihren Beziehungen zu den Orientalischen Religionen. Von O. GRUPPE. Erster Band: Einleitung. Leipzig: Teubner. 1887. 14 Mk.

THIS is a work in the very best German style. A chapter runs to nearly four hundred pages, the introduction to upwards of seven hundred, and each page is the very largest octavo, closely printed, and containing more matter than a page of the Classical Review, and the work on the title-page does not profess to be, like Mr. Casaubon's, A Key to all Mythologies, but merely to deal with one mythology, the Greek, and only with one aspect of that, its relation to Oriental religions. It is surely not with a light heart that one sits down to master the contents of such a work, with the prospect of a second and a third such volume yet to appear. Nor is one encouraged by the statement which meets one directly in the preface, that the whole work is based on the fundamental idea of an unbroken and general community of culture between the Greeks and the Orientals. The idea is as irritating as that of the Baconian authorship of Shakspere. But, lo! when one takes up the book, one is undone it is intoxicating; everything else must be put on one side, and you can do nothing else but read the book, and though it takes five days hard reading, it is-extravagant as the statement may soundworth the time expended.

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The work begins with a critical review of all the most important attempts that have been made in ancient times and modern to explain the meaning and origin of cults and myths. In this examination the author has, according to the preface, endeavoured to put aside all prepossessions and conduct the investigation without prejudice, in order to lay a safe foundation, if not for his own theory, at any rate for a better solution of

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the problem dealt with. It must therefore be regarded as a fresh instance of the truth that virtue is itself its own reward that the result of Herr Gruppe's long criticism of his predecessors is to establish the really fundamental idea of the book-which of course is that Herr Gruppe's key is right and everybody else's wrong. With the attempts made before the present century to explain the origin of myths, and the success with which Herr Gruppe successively overturns and triumphantly tramples on them, we do not propose to deal here. It is enough to say that these pages are most fascinating reading. They are so full of brilliant writing, profound learning, wholesome scepticism, and admirable common sense, that one's curiosityand again it is the irony of fate which has led to a consummation so widely opposed to the author's careful endeavour, as we are warned in the preface, to exclude everything that can excite the curiosity of the readerbecomes most eager to learn how Herr Gruppe will maintain his own thesis. The reader feels that the author must be above the ordinary arguments designed to prove the dependence of early Greece on Egypt and the Orient for its civilisation, art, and mythology; and yet how is it possible that evidence strong enough to convince such an admirable sceptic as Herr Gruppe can have escaped all his predecessors? With this undercurrent of eager curiosity running in one's mind one readily agrees with the author in dismissing the Rationalists, such as Grote, who will persist in endeavouring to import reason into myths which are evidently destitute of reason; and in dismissing the Localists, who, from the topographical features of one locality, try to derive an explanation for a myth which so far from being local is universal. But when the author next proceeds to open an attack on the school of Grimm the reader begins to feel that things are becoming serious. The

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Herr Gruppe points out, the people as a whole cannot compose; some one individual must first invent the tale, and from the narrow circle of his hearers the tale must spread from circle to circle until it gradually permeates the whole people. If it does so spread it becomes popular poetry and national. It is the expression of the people's feeling only in the sense that it alone has commended itself to the feelings of the people, whereas countless rival attempts have failed to commend themselves to the popular taste, have perished in the struggle for existence. But in what other way does the epic of literature survive in the struggle and become national? Plainly in both cases the function of the public is not creative but critical, in both cases it weeds out what it does not approve. It matters not from what point in the area of the nation the tale takes its start, the conditions which determine whether it shall or shall not spread in ever-widening circles from the spot into which it was first cast by the artist, until its final circle comprises the whole of the nation, are identical in both cases. But into what part of the nation is the myth first cast? Is it necessarily cast first amongst the lower classes of society, as is assumed by the Grimm school? On the contrary, it is matter of common observation that the lower classes endeavour to imitate the enjoyments and amusements of the upper, and in literature the fact is undoubted; the songs and anecdotes, &c., which in one generation are the exclusive property of the upper classes, in the next generation or the next after that sink to the middle and lower classes. So far as observation can establish any conclusion, it is that the direction of the current in these. matters is from the upper to the lower strata, not the opposite. But in any case the Grimm school leave the origin of myths quite unexplained. Granted that the point in society at which myths about the gods always originate is somewhere in the lower strata, what external force or internal impulse is it that compelled the people to imagine that there were gods

outside the world, and to bend the knee to them?

We now come to the school of Comparative Mythologists, represented by Adalbert Kuhn and Max Müller, who undertake to ascertain what gods the original Indo-Europeans worshipped, in the same way as it has been ascertained what plants they cultivated and what animals they had domesticated, and who announce to the world as the result of their investigations that the gods of the proethnic period were nature-gods, and its myths nature-myths. Herr Gruppe begins his examination of this theory with a review of those gods whose names have been established for the pro-ethnic period by etymological equations which do not violate the principles of Comparative Philology. Such are indeed few, but they are the names of nature-powers. That the words Dyaus, Uranos, Helios, do go back to Indo-Germanic times, the most cautious of philologists may safely admit; and words are the names of things, therefore the things, in this case gods, were known to the people who posResse the names for them? Not quite: words are certainly the names of things; but, unfortunately they are the names of other things also in many cases. The etymological equations referred to prove that the Indo-Europeans before their dispersion had names for the sun, the sky, &c. : they do not prove that the Indo-Europeans prayed to these phenomena of nature. But by violating the laws of Comparative Philology, which they protest must never be violated, the Comparative Mythologists succeed in imputing many other gods to the pro-ethnic period. With regard to these gods Herr Gruppe shows two things. First, it is those gods of whose functions, or the derivation of whose names, we know least, that are most plausibly identified. None of the public gods of the Greeks can be identified with a Hindu god without being violently wrested from his natural sphere, whereas a name of which we know so little as we know of Mamers or the Swabian hunter Marten can make no protest when it is identified with the Hindu Marutas. Next, viewing these identifications from the philological side, merely as etymological equations, we cannot but feel suspicious when we observe that these identifications never extend beyond two languages-except indeed when they do not extend as far as two, when, that is to say, one of the two names is invented for the purposes of Comparative Mythology, as for instance* Svarya to correspond to Hera or Dyunishya to Dionysus. When the iden

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