civilisation. It saluted without servility the forces of nature which
ministered to its needs. It burst into song in the presence of the
magnificent panorama spread out before it--day-sky and night-sky, dawn
and gloaming, clouds, thunder and rain, rivers, cattle and horses,
grain, fruit, fire, and wine. Nor were the social sanctities neglected.
Commemoration was made of the stages of mortal life, of the bonds of
love and kinship, of peace, of battle, and of mourning for the dead. By
a very intelligible figure and analogy the winds became shepherds, the
clouds flocks, the day a conqueror, the dawn a maid, the night a wise
sibyl and mysterious consort of heaven. These personifications were
tentative and vague, and the consequent mythology was a system of
rhetoric rather than of theology. The various gods had interchangeable
attributes, and, by a voluntary confusion, quite in the manner of later
Hindu poetry, each became on occasion any or all of the others.

Here the Indian pantheistic vertigo begins to appear. Many dark
superstitions, no doubt, bubbled up in the torrent of that plastic
reverie; for this people, clean and natural as on the whole it appears,
cannot have been without a long and ignoble ancestry. The Greeks
themselves, heirs to kindred general traditions, retained some childish
and obscene practices in their worship. But such hobgoblins naturally
vanish under a clear and beneficent sun and are scattered by healthy
mountain breezes. A cheerful people knows how to take them lightly, play
with them, laugh at them, and turn them again into figures of speech.
Among the early speakers of Sanskrit, even more than among the Greeks,
the national religion seems to have been nothing but a poetic
naturalism.

Such a mythology, however, is exceedingly plastic and unstable. If the
poet is observant and renews his impressions, his myths will become more
and more accurate descriptions of the facts, and his hypotheses about
phenomena will tend to be expressed more and more in terms of the
phenomena themselves; that is, will tend to become scientific. If, on
the contrary and as usually happens, the inner suggestions and fertility
of his fables absorb his interest, and he neglects to consult his
external perceptions any further, or even forgets that any such
perceptions originally inspired the myth, he will tend to become a
dramatic poet, guided henceforth in his fictions only by his knowledge
and love of human life.

[Sid