carries the lover beyond all thought of self is the result of a memory and a yearning which the beloved one's presence stirs within him; a memory of ante-natal visions, a yearning towards the home of the soul. The true end of love is mutual ennoblement; its fruition lies in the unseen. Or if we look to its earthly issue, it is not children only who are born from such unions as these, but from that fusion of earnest spirits, great thoughts, just laws, noble institutions spring,-"a fairer progeny than any child of man." Not one of the speculations of antiquity outdid in lofty origi nality this theme of Plato's. And however deeply the changing conditions of civilization might modify the outward forms or setting of love, this far-reaching conception has been immanent in the poet's mind, and has made of love an integral element in the spiritual scheme of things. "Love was given," says Wordsworth, in a poem which strangely harmonizes the antique and the modern ideal, "Love was given, Encouraged, sanctioned, chiefly for that end: For this the passion to excess was driven,— And even when the passion has not been thus directly linked with ethical aims, it has been credited with a heaven-sent, a mysterious charm; like the beauty and scent of flowers, it has been regarded as a joy given to us for the mere end of joy. In recent years, however, a wholly different aspect of the passion of love has been raised into prominence. This new theoryfor it is hardly less-is something much deeper than the mere satirical depreciation, the mere ascetic horror, of the female sex. It recognizes the mystery, the illusion, the potency of love: but it urges that this dominating illusion is no heaven-descended charm of life, but the result of terrene evolution; and that, so far from being salutary to the individual, it is expressly designed to entrap him into subserving the ends of the race, even when death to himself (or herself) is the immediate consequence. was in England that the facts in natural history which point to this conclusion were first set forth; it was in Germany that a philosophical theory was founded (even before most of those facts were known) upon these blind efforts of the race, working through the passions of the individual, yet often to his ruin: but it is in It France that we witness the actual entry of this theory into the affairs of life,-the gradual dissipation of the "sexual illusion" which nature has so long been weaving with unconscious magic around the senses and the imagination of man. In the first place, then, human attractiveness has suffered something of the same loss of romance which has fallen upon the scent and color of flowers, since we have realized that these have been developed as an attraction to moths and other insects, whose visits to the flower are necessary to secure effective fertilization. Our own attractiveness in each other's eyes seems no longer to point to some Divine reminiscence; rather, it is a character which natural and sexual selection must needs have developed, if our race was to persist at all: and it is paralleled by elaborate and often grotesque æsthetic allurements throughout the range of organized creatures of separate sex. In Once more. The great Roman poet of "wheat and woodland, tilth and vineyard, hive and horse and herd," insisted long ago on the divergence, throughout animated nature, of the promptings of amorous passion and of self-preservation. Passing beyond the facile optimism of pastoral singers, he showed the peace, the strength, the life of the animal creation at the mercy of an instinct which they can neither comprehend nor disobey. furias ignemque ruunt. Advancing science has both confirmed and explained this profound observation. She has discovered instances where the instinct in question conducts not merely to a remote and contingent but to an immediate and inevitable death, and where yet it works itself out with unfailing punctuality. And she has demonstrated that in the race of races the individual must not pause for breath; his happiness, his length of days must be subordinated to the supreme purpose of leaving a progeny which can successfully prolong the endless struggle. And here the bitter philosophy of Schopenhauer steps in, and shows that as man rises from the savage state, the form of the illusive witchery changes, but the witchery is still the same. Nature is still prompting us to subserve the advantage of the race,—an advantage which is not our own,- though she uses now such delicate baits as artistic admiration, spiritual sympathy, the union of kindred souls. Behind and beneath all these is still her old unconscious striving; but she can scarcely any longer outwit us: we now desire neither the pangs of passion, nor the restraints of marriage, nor the burden of offspring; while for the race we 10520 need care nothing, or may even deem it best and most merciful that the race itself should lapse and pass away. The insensible advance of this sexual disenchantment will show itself first and most obviously in the imaginative literature of a nation. And the transition from romanticism to so-called naturalism in fiction, which is the conspicuous fact of the day in France, is ill understood if it be taken to be a mere change in literary fashion, a mere reaction against sentimental and stylistic extravagance. The naturalists claim-and the claim is justthat they seek at least a closer analogy with the methods of science herself; that they rest not on fantastic fancies, but on the documents humains which are furnished by the actual life of every day. But on the other hand, the very fact that this is all which they desire to do, is enough to prove that even this will scarcely be worth the doing. The fact that they thus shrink from idealizing bespeaks an epoch barren in ideal. Schopenhauer boasted that he had destroyed "die Dame," the chivalrous conception of woman as a superior being; and such novels as those of Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant, exhibit the world with this illusion gone. If, moreover, the relations between men and women are not kept, in a sense, above the relations between men and men, they will rapidly fall below them. We are led into a world of joyless vice from the sheer decay of the conception of virtue. And thus we are brought, by a natural transition, to the fourth and last illusion from which French thought is shaking itself free, the illusion which pervades man more profoundly than any other: the dream of his own free-will, and of his psychical unity. It is in the analysis of this personal illusion that much of the acutest French work has lately been done; it is here that ordinary French opinion is perhaps furthest removed from the English type; and it is here, moreover, as I shall presently indicate, it is on this field of experimental psychology,- that the decisive battles of the next century seem likely to be fought. In this essay, however, I must keep clear of detail, and must touch only on the general effect of the mass of teaching. As regards the freedom of the will, indeed, it might have. been supposed that the controversy had now been waged too long to admit of much accession of novel argument. Nor, of course, can any theory which we hold as to human free-will reasonably influence our actions one way or the other. Yet we know that 10521 as a matter of actual observation, Mahommedan fatalism does influence conduct; and the determinism which is becoming definitely the creed of France may similarly be traced throughout their modern pictures of life and character, as a paralyzing influence in moments of decisive choice, of moral crisis. I have now, though in a very brief and imperfect way, accomplished the task which seemed to me to have some promise of instruction. I have tried to decompose into its constituent elements the vague but general sense of malaise or decadence which permeates so much of modern French literature and life. And after referring this disenchantment to the loss of certain beliefs and habits of thought which the majority of educated Frenchmen have come with more or less distinctness to class as illusions, I have endeavored-it may be thought with poor success— to suggest some possibility of the reconstitution of these illusions on a basis which can permanently resist scientific attack. In experimental psychology I have suggested, so to say, a nostrum, but without propounding it as a panacea; and I cannot avoid the conclusion that we are bound to be prepared for the worst. Yet by "the worst" I do not mean any catastrophe of despair, any cosmic suicide, any world-wide unchaining of the brute that lies pent in man. I mean merely the peaceful, progressive, orderly triumph of l'homme sensuel moyen [the average man]; the gradual adaptation of hopes and occupations to a purely terrestrial standard; the calculated pleasures of the cynic who is resolved to be a dupe no more. Such is the prospect from our tower of augury- the warning note from France, whose inward crises have so often prefigured the fates through which Western Europe was to pass ere long. Many times, indeed, have declining nations risen anew, when some fresh knowledge, some untried adventure, has added meaning and zest to life. Let those men speak to us, if any there be, who can strengthen our hearts with some prevision happier than mine. For if this vanward and eager people is never to be "begotten again unto a lively hope" by some energy still unfelt and unsuspected, then assuredly France will not suffer alone from her atrophy of higher life. No; in that case like causes elsewhere must produce like effects; and there are other great nations whose decline will not be long delayed. MYTHS AND FOLK-LORE OF THE ARYAN W PEOPLES BY WILLIAM SHARP AND ERNEST RHYS ITH the advance of the new science of folk-lore, we are apt to forget perhaps that the old literature on which the study is based is one of the richest and most entertaining in the world. Fairy-tale is its foster-mother, and the home out of which it passed is as mysterious as fairy-land itself, and as full of wonders; although the name of "Aryan" may seem at a first glance to suggest only the science of races, or the endless differences of the doctors of philology over the relations of myth to the decay of language. That, however, is a side of the subject upon which we are not called to dwell. Science apart, it is enough to show that the way into the old wonder-land where the early Aryans first drew breath, and shaped our speech, and began our traditions, may be traveled for the sheer pleasure of the adventure, as well as for abstruser ends. The mysterious door of the Aryan mythologies may look forbidding, but its "Open sesame!" is nothing more occult than the title of the first time-honored fairy-tale one happens to remember. And once inside this dim ancestral gate, the demesne is so richly fertile, and so various in its partitions and pleasaunces, that the idlest observer cannot but be allured further. The Aryan realm, eastern and western, includes not only the Greek, Scandinavian, and Indian mythologies, but Slavic folk-tales, Roumanian folk-songs, Sicilian idyls, and all the confused popular traditions of the Anglo-Celtic peoples. If we may believe the folk-lorists, -as here at least we can do,— King Arthur and Queen Guinevere are among its heroic children, equally with Odin and Sigurd, or Heracles and Helen of Troy. Its music is echoed in the early Celtic elemental rhymes and poems, equally with the Vedic Hymns and the epic strain of Homer. Its traditions flit to and fro over the face of the earth, from the Ganges to the Mississippi, from the Thames to the Tiber. The nursery tales we tell our children to-day are, many of them, but variants of the old primitive tales of Light and Darkness, Sleep and Silence, told to the babes that watched the flames flicker, or heard the wolves howl, amid the trees of that unmapped region which was the birthplace of the Aryan peoples. |