F. Edward Hulme

“ Goar, the fairness of whose person was as great as the unfairness of her conduct in luring to their destruction the passing travellers. Here again, of course, matter-of-fact people have stepped in and explained all away, a striking echo and a rock on which to strike being all that is left to us, the moral being, that if people will be so foolish as to awaken by bugle or song the slumbering voices of the rocks when they ought to be giving their whole attention to their steering, what wonder if they come to grief? ”

“ The imagination is then awed as our thoughts attempt to bridge over the interval of two thousand years between these present days and that far-off morning in the childhood of the world when the beautiful fresh flowers of the blue lotus of the Nile were placed in the coffin of Rameses II. Almost all the history of the world has been made since those fragile emblems of passing beauty were laid in the tomb. ”

“ WHILE we find numerous extraordinary beliefs clustering round the so-called natural history of various birds, such as the legend of the pelican nourishing its young with its own blood, or the eagle teaching its offspring to gaze on the brightness of the mid-day sun, it is curious to note how little of absolute myth-creation has been developed in the direction of strange forms of bird life. ”

“ On many of the early muskets this idea was emphasised by having the head of a dragon wrought on the muzzle, the actual flash of the piece on its discharge issuing from its mouth.
One naturally turns to Shakespeare for an apt illustration of any conceivable point that may arise. The lover finds in him his tender sonnets, the lawyer his quillets of the law, the soldier the glorification of arms, and the philosopher rich mines of wisdom. The antiquary finds in him no less a golden wealth of allusion to all the customs and beliefs of his day. ”

“ The depths and recesses of the great tropical forests, as impressive almost in their vastness as the ocean itself, or the far-reaching swamps and morasses in their mysterious shades, have in like manner been tenanted in the imagination of the savage tribes that thread their depths or probe their treacherous surface with forms more wonderful even than those of Nature herself, weird and bizarre as these in tropical regions so frequently are. Hence amongst all savage tribes we find a belief in serpentine forms more terrible even than the boa or python that they have such cause to dread. ”

“ It has been conjectured that the kraken myth has sprung from stories of gigantic cuttle-fish or octopus, the devil fish described so vividly by Victor Hugo in his “Toilers of the Sea;” but one can hardly fall in quite readily with this notion, since the leading idea, so to speak, in the kraken belief is that of a monstrous and quiescent mass, suggestive more than anything else of an island rising from the sea, while the dominant idea in our minds of the octopus is of a creature armed with far-stretching and numerous arms that enwrap their hapless victim in their pitiless embrace. ”

“ The lovers of the marvellous in the West built upon this weak foundation a most poetic superstructure, and believed that the bird was indeed the denizen of paradise, fed upon the dew of heaven, incapable of contact with earth, building no nest, but hatching its eggs in a cavity upon its own back; ever soaring in the sunlight far above earth, and independent of all mundane association. ”

“ In Shakespeare’s time it was a belief that no one could see the fairies and live, for he makes Falstaff exclaim, “They are fairies, he who looks on them shall die;” but any one who desires to see them through the eye of a poet should read most carefully the altogether delightful “Midsummer Night’s Dream.” ”

“ To an Arab already suffering from an evil conscience the belief in the hameh must be a terrible one, as he hears in fancy the troubled air filled with the wailing cry and fierce demand for vengeance, and knows that, day or night, the haunting sound will never leave his ears until the desert feud be avenged and his own [Pg 141] life blood be poured out like water upon the burning sand. ”

“ Beneath the mass of ever-varying fable stands the like foundation, the strife between the two antagonistic principles; and thus the wide world over, in every age and in every clime, the mind of man, in broken accents, it may be, and with faltering tongue, records with joy its upward struggle, feels the need of help in the sore conflict, registers its belief in final triumph. ”

“ Of giants, the opposite extreme in the scale, we need say but little. Probably in many cases the early peoples, who desired to honour their great champions, felt that the marvels they delighted to credit them with must have been the work of men of more than human power and parts. We see much the same feeling in the sculptures of antiquity, the monuments of Egypt and Assyria, where the monarch far outweighs even in mere physical bulk the subjects that surround him. Hence, like Goliath, the champions of old are generally giants ”

“ While the Dolphin, like the nautilus, has a veritable existence, and may be duly found amongst the works of nature, it has also, like the nautilus again, served as the foundation for a considerable amount of mythical lore. Thus Pliny, in his so-called Natural History, from which we have already drawn so many curious extracts, writes—“The swiftest of all other living creatures whatsoever, and not of sea-fish only, is the dolphin; quicker than the flying fowl, swifter than the arrow shot out of a bow.” ”

“ The tree is also called the tree of the imagination; and it might, we fear, be equally called the imaginary tree, as all the resources of science are strained in vain to tell us anything more definite about it. ”

“ The belief in centaurs is not, therefore, so difficult a myth to trace to its origin [Pg 85] as many others. The usual form of representation is the conjoining of the body and legs of a horse and the head, arms, and body of a man so far as the waist, though in some early works, as, for example, in archaic pottery in the British Museum, the legs of the man take the place of the fore-legs of the horse. The celebrated statue in the Louvre known as the Borghese Centaur, a sculpture of the most refined period of Greek art, gives the best idea, perhaps, of the highest treatment the form permits. ”

“ Though the Chameleon, unlike the phœnix, the griffin, or the basilisk, is a living verity, so large a body of fable has grown up around it that the animal is almost as mythical as those creatures of the imagination. The name is derived from two Greek words signifying “ground-lion,” a name singularly inappropriate in every way, as it has nothing leonine in look or nature, while its organisation fits it especially for living on trees. When we consider the singularity of its appearance and the peculiarity of its habits, it is by no means surprising that it should have attracted attention ”

“ The belief in some such creature seems to have been widespread; the myth of the Sirens is, for example, very similar in conception. In Mansfield Parkyns’ “Life in Abyssinia” we read—“There is an animal which I know not where to class, as no European has hitherto succeeded in obtaining a specimen of it. It is supposed by the natives to be far more active, powerful, and dangerous than the lion, and consequently held by them in the greatest possible dread. They look upon it more in the light of an evil spirit, with an animal’s form, than a wild beast; they assert that its face is human.” ”

“ It is but little strange, that early navigators with all the superstitions of their race, and having a very slight knowledge of natural history, should be deceived, when we find in Scoresby’s Voyages the incident narrated of the surgeon of his ship so deceived by one of these creatures that he reported that “he had seen a man with his head just above the surface of the water.” At the same time, it appears to us at least as probable that the mermaid, like the sea-horses of Poseidon, was purely a creature of the imagination. ”

“ Neither will he credit that a man may be made to incur the hatred of all his fellow-citizens by having his gate-posts anointed with another nasty preparation of chameleon. As a set-off to all this very unusual incredulity he hastens to adopt the statement of another wise man, Democritus, that it has the power of attracting to the earth birds of prey, so that they in turn become the prey of other animals—a most unselfish proceeding on the part of the creature, as its own food consists of flies and such like small matters. ”

“ The book goes on to tell us that authors differ about the bigness of it, for some say it is a span in compass and half a foot long, while others, with a truer sense of the marvellous, realise more fully that bulk is a potent element in all such matters, and at once make it four feet long. Its poison is so strong that there is no cure for it, and the air is in such a degree affected by its presence that no creature can live near it. It kills, we are assured, not only by its touch, but even the sight of the cockatrice, like that of the basilisk, is death. ”

“ For instance, when they were sitting in the kitchen, they were at high gambols in the dairy, or when they were yoking the cows, they would see the fairies in the kitchen, dancing and laughing, and provokingly merry. One day, as there was a great number of reapers partaking of a harvest-dinner, which was prepared with great care and nicety by the housewife, they heard music and dancing and laughing above, and a great shower of dust fell down, and covered all the victuals which were upon the table. ”

“ We can well imagine the indignant astonishment of the cockatrice, after being for years the monarch of all it surveyed, when the gallant little weasel, strong in the triple armour which makes a quarrel just, and duly fortified by the internal application of rue, charges boldly home and takes him, monstrorum rex, by the throat. ”

“ The widely spreading worship of the serpent, a form of religion that we find in so many lands and throughout centuries of time, is a most interesting subject of study, though we can here only regret that exigencies of space compel us to do no more than merely mention it.
The belief in sea-serpents does not appear in itself to be an unreasonable one, much as it is from time to time ridiculed. ”

“ She plunged in, and they waited long: when she returned she was dead; they opened her hands, but there was no earth in them. ‘Then,’ said the otter, ‘will I seek the earth,’ and the bold swimmer dived from the raft. The otter was gone still longer than the beaver, but when he returned to the surface he too was dead, and there was no earth in his claws.
“‘Who shall find the earth?’ exclaimed all those on the raft, ‘now that the beaver and the otter are dead?’ ‘That will I,’ said the musk-rat, and he quickly disappeared between the logs of the raft. ”

“ The salamander, like the toad, the slow-worm, or the water newt, is still held to be decidedly uncanny. In our younger days our seeking after such small objects of natural history was always held by wondering rustics as a foolish tempting of Providence, and we have repeatedly been told the most moving stories of the poisonous nature of all such creatures, and especially how newts developed the most alarming properties if interfered with, biting out pieces of the captor’s flesh, and then spitting fire into the wound. ”

“ We are told that “the wolf is a very ravenous creature, and as dangerous to meet with, when hungry, as any beast whatever, but when his stomach is full, he is to men and beasts as meek as a lamb. When he falls upon a hog or a goat, or such small beasts, he does not immediately kill them, but leads them by the ear, with all the speed he can, to a crew of ravenous wolves, who instantly tear them to pieces.” ”

“ The Sphinx may be considered as more especially an artistic and symbolic creation, though the old Greek myth of Œdipos would seem to show that in very early times there was a real belief in a real monster. The sphinx is composite in nature, being in Greek art and legend ordinarily the combination of the head and bust of a woman with the body of a lion and the wings of an eagle; while in Egyptian art the creature is always wingless, and its recumbent leonine body is surmounted by the head of a man, hawk, or other creature. ”

“ Another curious belief of the Arabs is in the existence of a bird called the Hameh. This uncomfortable creation of the Arab fancy is said to spring from the blood of a murdered man. Its weird cry is continuously “Iskoonee,” a word signifying “give me to drink,” and it rests not, day nor night, till its thirst is quenched in the murderer’s blood. When the death of the victim is avenged it flies away to some place left altogether indefinite in the Eastern legend, but probably it wends its way to the spirit-land with the welcome news that the victim’s blood no longer cries in vain for vengeance. ”

“ We are told, too, that the lion sleeps with his eyes open, and many other curious details follow. On the next page the unicorn is in all sober seriousness described. “His head resembles a hart’s, his feet an elephant’s, his tail a boar’s, and the rest of his body a horse’s. The horn is about a foot and a half in length, his voice is like the lowing of an ox, his horn [Pg 4] is as hard as iron and as rough as any file.” ”

“ Though the dragon-conflict occurs in many literatures, the same incidents occur over and over again, and we find in almost all the power and subtlety of the monster, the innocence and helplessness of his victims, the suddenness of his attack on them, and the completeness of his final overthrow, the dragon-slayers being the [Pg 20] conquerors over tyranny and wrong, over paganism and every form of godless evil. ”

“ The “Rariorum Plantarum Historia” of Clusius is now before us as we write, and we learn from its title-page that it was published at Antwerp in the year 1601. We have Adam on one side, in the simplicity of costume of Eden’s earliest days, and on the other Solomon, with crown and royal robes and sceptre, bearing in his hands a book. Adam is claimed by the mediæval herbalists as not only a tiller of the ground, but also as a student of botanical science, while Solomon, we all remember, wrote a treatise that dealt with plants, from the lordly cedar to the lowly hyssop of the wall. ”