ro^-3
1-
STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS
BENJAMIN P. KURTZ
Assistant Professor of English
in ike University of California
T. FISHER UNWIN THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON: ADELPHI TERRACE BERKELEY
LEIPSIC. INSELSTRASSE lo ,g,0
1910
STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PUBLICATIONS
STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS
BENJAMIN P. KURTZ
Assistant Professor of English
in the Uni'versity of California
T. FISHER UNWIN THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON: ADELPHI TERRACE BERKELEY
LEIPSIC: INSELSTRASSE zo
igio
C.3
PREFACE.
This book is the expansion of a thesis of the same title
submitted in 1905 to the English Department of the University
of California in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
degree of Doctor of Philosophy. I wish gratefully to acknowl-
edge the constant help afforded me in the preparation of these
papers by Professor Charles Mills Gayley. In no way is he to
be held responsible for the views here expressed; but hardly
could they have taken shape without his friendly and unfailing
criticism.
Bebkeley, March, 1909.
CONTENTS.
Chapter Page
Introduction 3
I. Greek Criticism of Fiction and Marvel 14
11. The Psychology of Wonder 52
III, Wonder in Primitive Mind, Custom, and Belief 93
IV. Wonder in Central Australian Belief and Story 135
Conclusion 171
Tavra tolwv lort ixiv ^v/xwavTa iK ravTov Trd6ov<;, koI Trpos tovtoi<s
Irepa ^vpia, /cat toutwv Irt davfjiaaroTcpa' 8ia 8c ;(porou Tr\rjOo<;, to. fikv
al'Twv aTri(7J3r]K€, to. Si, Buairapixeva elpyjTaL X^P'-'* ^/ctttrra drr a\Xi]\(DV. o
8' icTTi iraat tovtol<; uiTtov to ira.Oo'i, ovSets (.iprjKC. vvv 8c S»y Acktcov. tis
yap T7)i' Tov ySacnAeoJS d7ro8ei^iv irphpu prjdev, — Plato: PoUticus, 269B.
' ' All these stories, and ten thousand others which are still more wonder-
ful, have a common origin ; many of them have been lost in the lapse of ages,
or are repeated only in a disconnected form; but the origin of them is what
no one has told, and may as well be told now; for the tale is suited to throw
light on the nature of the king. ' '
Tr., Benjamin Jowett, Dialogues of Plato, iv, 467.
". . . dieser (der Mythos) als eine vom Volke selbst geschaffene
Welt von Phantasiebildern blieb im Alterthum immer der Hauptinhalt der
Dichtung auch in der Zeit der Verstandesbildung, nur dass nun das poetische
Bild von der prosaischen Wirklichkeit unterschieden wurde. ' '
A. Boeckh, Encyk. u. Method, d. Philol. Wisschftn.,
2d ed., Leipzig 1886, p. 649.
" . . . But little by little, in what seemed the most spontaneous fiction,
a more comprehensive study of the sources of poetry and romance begins to
disclose a cause for each fancy, an education that has led up to each train
of thought, a store of inherited materials from out of which each province
of the poet 's land has been shaped, and built over, and peopled. ' '
E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, i, 273.
STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS.
INTRODUCTION.
The marvellous in Eomance — Its profusion, and recurrent
character — Its neglect by literary criticism — Aristotle — Desul-
tory and fragmentary nature of wonder-criticism after
Aristotle — Data furnished by the ethnologists — The opportunity
for a criticism of the marvellous — Purpose and plan of the
present work — History of the usage of the term ' ' marvellous ' '
— as an intensive — as denoting the supernatural — in other
languages — Suggestiveness of these usages.
Throughout the course of romance one element occurs
continually, — the marvellous. In the literature of every age its
presence is provocative of pleasure or criticism upon the part of
the reading or learned public. In the myth and legend of the
barbarian it multiplies under religious and faithful sanction.
With the rise of a critical philosophy it is subjected to searching
analysis ; but no philosophy or science of a few can check its ad-
vance, for it lives perennially in the hearts and in the super-
stitions of the ignorant masses. When a self-conscious epic art
develops, the adoption and handling of the prodigious become
subjects of acrimonious dispute.^ The European ]\[iddle Ages con-
tributed to occidental marvel a renovation, and a new impulse
along both sacred and profane lines. Chivalry, that romantic
institution of the wonderful, belonged, as Professor Woodberry
has well said, "to a world of marvel, where the unloiown,
even in geography, was a large constituent element, and magic,
superstition, and devildom were so rife as to be almost parts of
the human mind."- Medieval Metrical Romance perpetuated all
1 Cf. Ker, Epic and Eomance, 1897, pp. 34, 39.
2G. E. Woodberry, in McClure's Magazine, April, 1905. Vol. XXIV,
p. 621. (Art. Cervantes.)
4 STUDIES IX THE MAEVELLOUS.
this ill a literary form; and, after the skepticism of the Age of
Reason hail dwindled, the same themes lived again in the modern
romanticist's keen delight in wonder and amplification.^ The
mood of marvel was making its way back into English literature
of the eighteenth century even while Robert Anderson, travelling
through Scotch scenes in "moralizing mood," was at pains to
asperse it thus in a letter to the wonder-loving Bishop of
Dromore: "I surveyed for the first time the scenery of the
Border Ballads, and visited the ancient castles of the Border
chiefs, the dens of thieves and robbers. I sat on the ruins of
Hermitage, in a moralizing rather than a marvellous mood, so
that I saw neither Redcap nor Shellycoat; and indeed the
creatures of popular superstition live only in legends, and no
longer haunt these peaceful valleys. ' '*
While reading this letter from Robert Anderson, it occurred
to me that there is an opportunity for research into the treatment
of the marvellous in literature. For, while most of the principles
and elements of literary art enumerated by Aristotle in the Poetics
have received a systematic and comparative illustration from the
hands of such modern critics as Brunetiere, Texte, Beljame, Paris,
and Gautier, the important literary ingredient here called the
marvellous, which is mentioned repeatedly in the twenty-fourth
and twenty-fifth chapters of the Poetics, has not as yet been
exploited by any modern literary critic of the scientific school.
It is possible to go even further, and say that nothing of compre-
hensive scope has been written upon the wonderful by any literary
student of any school of criticism since Aristotle in a fragmentary
way marked out its scope in epic and tragedy, and incidentally
declared its justification under the broader category of poetic
truth. Opinions of the moment, to be sure, mere asides from other
investigations, have often been thrown out, from Plato or Horace
down ; and the ancients occasionally made collections of wonder-
stories, such as the famous pseudo- Aristotelian HEPI 0ATMAS-
IHN AKOTSMATHN. Photius (Vol. 3, Col. 413) quaintly
notices one of these latter as consisting of four books, one each on
3 Cf. Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Eomancc, London 1762, p. 319.
(No. X.)
* Nichols, lUufttrations, etc., London 1817-58, VII, 187.
INTEODUCTION. 5
the following subjects : of incredible fiction, of incredible stories
about demons, of incredible tales of souls appearing after death,
of incredible things of nature. But these had no more purpose of
literary criticism than did the moralistic and philosophic objec-
tions of the Greek philosophers who descended upon Homer for
employing incredible and impious tales about the gods. The self-
conscious epic art of the Italian Renaissance, of Ariosto and
Tasso, drew in its wake an acrimonious and voluminous disputa-
tion upon the place of the prodigious in epic composition; but
the criticism was always dogmatic, a priori, and partisan — never
comparative and inductive. The same is true of the English
echoes of that continental battle of the books. D 'Avenant, Hurd,
Pope, Addison, and others, contributed their not infrequent, but
always tentative, paragraphs to the question of the proper place
of wonder in the various literary types. Fielding, in one of his
asides in Tom Jones, discoursed wittily upon the proper use of
wonder in his own art. There is an extremely sketchy essay by
Yardley upon The Supernatural in Bomantic Fiction,^ which
stands very lonely in the midst of modern criticism along other
lines. Now and then have appeared short essays upon the habits
of particular authors or periods in dealing wnth the wonderful,
such as Dj^er's essay upon the folk-lore in Shakespeare," or
Bodmer's antiquated monograph upon the angels in Paradise
Lost.'' A collection of medieval wonders in the sixth volume of
the Studien zur vergleichenden Literaturgeschichte suggests the
sort of preliminary collection of data which must precede any
methodical inquiry upon the subject. A classification of the
wonders in French literature of the age of Louis XIV has been
made by Delaporte.® The most encouraging work that has yet
appeared is Reitzenstein 's Hellenistische Wundererzdhlungen.^
In this monograph, undertaken primarily as a study in theological
criticism, the author argues for the derivation of much of the
5 London 1880.
6 Dyer, T. F., FolJc-Lore of Shalcespeare, New York 1884.
7 Bodmer, Kritische Abhandlung von dem Wunderharen in der Poesie,
Zurich 1740.
8 P. V. Delaporte, Du Merveilleux dans la Littcraiure Fran(;aise sous le
Begne de Louis XIV., Paris 1891.
9 Eeitzenstein, Hellenistische Wundererzdhlungen, Leipzig, 1906.
6 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS.
wonder-element in early Christian literature from Hellenistic
sources; and incidentally he distinguishes two types of separate
origin, the Hellenistic wonder tale (or aretalogy, as he calls it),
and the Hellenistic romance.
But if the marvellous has failed to receive a satisfactory treat-
ment at the hands of literary students, in another direction it has
been investigated with surprising fulness. The students of eth-
nology and folk-lore have, with purposes quite other than those
of literary' criticism, brought together, and partially classified, a
vast number of marvels drawn from primitive and popular
religious belief, custom, and superstition. It is hardly necessary
to cite the long roster of those who in all parts of the learned
world are following in the steps of Lord Avebury, Spencer, Tylor,
Frazer, and Berenger-Feraud. By the systematic and devoted
efforts of this great band of modern humanists, there has been
brought together a mass of observations and explanations of the
marvellous element in belief and story, which, though quite inde-
pendent of any literary interpretation, nevertheless is by all
odds the most considerable achievement in the study of the
wonderful, not only since the time of Aristotle, but in all time.
Such works, to mention only English examples, as The Origins
of Civilization, Primitive Culture, The Golden Bough, Myth,
Ritual and Religion, or The Legend of Perseus, are as monu-
mental to the success attending the application of the methods
of scientific research to spiritual matters as they are unique in
the history of humanism.
Dr. Tylor, speaking in the light of his long investigations,
has said, in the first volume of his Primitive Culture, that "little
by little, in what seemed the most spontaneous fiction, a more
comprehensive study of the sources of poetry and romance begins
to disclose a cause for each fancy, an education that has led up
to each train of thought, a store of inherited materials from out
of which each province of the poet's land has been shaped, and
built over, and peopled." Than this statement, based upon the
scientific accumulations of Tylor and his fellow-students, there
could be nothing more encouraging to the literary student who
might wish to take up Aristotle's observations and expand them
into a coherent presentation of the function and development of
INTRODUCTION. 7
the marvellous in literature. Here, ready to his hand, is a body
of data and principles, which needs only an application of the
literary point of view, and the addition of further data, strictly
literary, which did not enter into the view of the ethnologists, to
be reduced to a history and theory of the appearance, function,
and development of the literary use of the wonderful. Here are
the keys to a literary criticism of the marvellous that will show
the relations between the various cases or details of wonder before
they were incorporated in literary beginnings, during the proc-
esses of that incorporation, and through their subsequent stages
of literary development. By following successively the constantly
changing relations of the wonder-element in literature to other
elements, and to the general principles, of literary art and
evolution; by observing its concomitant and relative positions
in the various literary types at the different periods of their
development ; by determining the evolution of particular marvels
as they are influenced or determined by parallel changes in the
technique and consciousness of the literary artist ; by explicating
the sometimes obvious, the sometimes subtle, influence of con-
temporary philosophic or scientific criticism of the marvellous
upon the vitality and popularity of wonder in purely literary
usage; by generalizations concerning the inspiration offered by
wonder to the individual artist at various stages of his own or
the race's development, — by such employments as these that
peculiarly basic element in literary interest, which, as Aristotle
racily observed, persuades good stoiy-tellers, consciously or un-
consciously, to add something wonderful to their recitals, would
receive the consistent treatment and illustration obviously de-
manded by its prime, but slightly recognized, importance.
The studies included in this book represent a series of pre-
liminary attempts to supply the need of a literary criticism of
the marvellous, and to make use, for this purpose, of the data
collected by the ethnologists. Each one of these attempts has
been undertaken separately, with a view to approaching the sub-
ject from various points of vantage ; and so strictly have the facts
been followed that the postponement of conclusions to a regular
position behind the data has often enjoined a rather bulkj'
8 STUDIES IN THE MAEVELLOUS.
handling of the argument. Whatever relations there may be
between the studies is the result of identity of the object under
consideration in each case — not of any concatenated theory of the
rise of the marvellous and its development into literary form.
Inevitably many such relations have developed : the conclusions
based upon them have been rigorously deferred to the close of
every chapter, and are collected at the end of the volume.
The methods adopted, or rather the points of view, were
arrived at simply. The first study endeavors to gain some
orientation toward the subject by tracing in detail the history of
what Greek literary criticism had to say on the use of the mar-
vellous. Thus the warrant in previous criticism for the present
undertaking can be determined, while at the same time the
various moments and trends in the development of Greek criti-
cism, themselves considered as stages in the development of the
marvellous in literature, are revealed. The next study is an effort
toward the attainment of some general psychological criteria
of wonder. It is believed that the subjective nature of the
wonderful makes such a standard absolutely imperative. This
subjective aspect of the problem is frankly conceded at the out-
set. These essays are very intentionally studies in subjective
phenomena. It is not conceived that the subjective character of
the work can be extended as an objection to its value or prac-
ticability by those who themselves have indulged in researches
into the tragic, the comic, the satiric, the beautiful, and the
like, in literature ; nor yet by those who have studied the nature
and development of either art or belief. The third chapter
begins to take up the ethnological evidence. It regards the
general fields of primitive belief and custom in order to determine
what in them may be the general forces and conditions relative to
wonder and the wonderful. In the final study, a particular
primitive people, the Central Australians, are brought before the
reader; and, after a discussion of their cultural conditions, their
actual legends, as reported by investigators who lived among
them for a long time, are contemplated and resolved into elements
which do possess, or do not possess, wonder. So far as is possible,
by piecing together evidence and inference, these elements are
INTBODUCTION. 9
discussed in view of their relations to any inceptive literary
treatment they have undergone in the course of being handed
down in tradition and legend. In a word, this last study of the
present collection is an investigation of the first, actual, positive
step taken by what are nowadays called marvels, out of their
beginnings in belief and custom, and into their modification at
the hands of the earliest type of narrative art. It is the first stage
of the story-marvel.
In the course of these studies one question will continually
recur : What is the exact meaning of the word marvellous ? As
a preliminary consideration of this difficulty, a brief notice of the
use and definition of the word may be conveniently inserted at
this place. It will be seen, moreover, that the history of the use
and meaning of the word bears very directly on the entire
problem before us.
Upon the part of one of the least superstitious minds of the
nineteenth century there is a striking use of the word marvellous.
In the last essay of the last book published by Herbert Spencer
this passage occurs : ' ' Concerning the multitudes of remarkable
relations among lines and among spaces very few ever ask — Why
are they so? Perhaps the question may in later years be raised,
as it has been in myself, by some of the more conspicuously
marvellous truths now grouped under the title of 'the Geometry
of Position.' Many of these are so astounding that but for the
presence of ocular proof they would be incredible ; and by their
marvellousness, as well as by their beauty, they serve, in some
minds at least, to raise the unanswerable question — How came
there to exist among the parts of this seemingly-structureless
vacancy we call Space, these strange relations? How does it
happen that the blank form of things presents us with truths as
incomprehensible as do the things it contains ?"^°
The way in which the word ' * marvellous ' ' is used in this quota-
tion offers a suggestive starting point for the discussion of the
general use of the substantive and its derivatives. On the one
hand, it will be noted that these space-relations, which are pro-
10 H. Spencer, Facts and Comments, New York 1902, pp. 290-291. The
italics are mine.
10 STUDIES IN THE MABVELLOUS.
nonnced marvellous, are by ocular proof actual realities. There
is about them nothing that is strange to the order of nature.
There is no supernatural intrusion. They are extraordinary only
to a limited observation ; strange only to the mind unaccustomed
to waiting upon them. On the other hand, there is a note of
sublimity in the emotion with which they are regarded. Now the
application of the adjective ''marvellous" to such associations
illustrates a very general use of the term, and one that it has
always exercised, — the designation of the extraordinary that is
within the realm of possibility, but has about it an air of sub-
limity. At present this connotation belongs to the literary or
learned use of the word. It is a heavier word than the Saxon
equivalent, "wonder," — "a little more wonderful than wonder-
ful." In Spencer's sentence, "wonderful" cannot be substituted
for "marvellous" without a loss of emphasis.
But, as a variation of this usage, the word, still applied to the-
possible, is often employed in the familiar fashion of a mere
intensive to express conditions, the extraordinary character of
which is comparatively low and insignificant in degree. In
Middle English, merveil, marveyle (or any other of its dozen or-
more spellings) was used oftener in this more familiar way than
in the more sublime connotation. Extraordinary adventures,
were always dubbed marvellous, as :
Lat no clerk haue cause or diligence
To wryte of yow a storie of swich meruaille
As of Grisildia pacient and kynde,ii
or,
He made so grete merueyll of armea, that the Frensmen durst not com'
forth for fere of hym.12
Distinguished service of any kind might be termed a matter-
of marvel. Thus :
Saturnus after his exile fro Crete cam in great perile
Into the londes of Itaile,
And there he did great merveile.
For he founde of his own wit
The first crafte of ploughtilling."
The extreme familiarity of the word as a mere intensive, is.
illustrated by
11 Chaucer, C. T., II E, 1185.
i2Caxt. S. of Aym., p. 79.
"Gower, II, 168.
INTRODUCTION. 11
pe Saxons . . . broughte wij? hem Hengistus his daughter, a wonderful
fairs mayde, mervellious of kynde and wonder sightly for men to byholde.i*
In the verb form this extreme familiarity is especially common in
Middle English romances. "He merueyled him," or the like, is
a part of the stock phraseology of the old tale-tellers, and sug-
gests nothing more than amazement, or wonder ; thus :
Whan Reynawde sawe so grete nombre of folke eomynge oute of the
wode, he was sore merveylled.is
With the Elizabethans, too, the more familiar usage is that
oftener met with.
A mad-man that haunts the Fayre, doe you not know him? it's marueU
he has not more followers, after his ragged heeles.i^
Shakespeare, in the great majority of cases, as may easily be seen
by consulting Dr. Schmidt's Shakespeare-Lexicon, employs the
word familiarly, while he reserves wonder and wonderful for
cases of rarer moment.
Good faith, this same young sober-blooded boy doth not love me; nor a
man cannot make him laugh; but that's no marvel, he drinks no wine.iT
With the dramatist, too, the adverbial use, signifying "very,"
"extraordinarily," is common. "Marvellous searching wine,"
"marvellous convenient place," "marvellous hairy about the
face," and the like, are to be found in every play. On the other
hand, English of the present has lost this ready, French use
of the word, but inherits a looseness of application, on the part
of the hyperbolically minded at least, which almost takes its place
in colloquial life.
The extraordinary that is still within the realm of possibility,
if not of probability, that posits nothing that is contrary to the
law of nature, is thus, either in its familiar cases or in its sub-
limer effects, termed the marvellous. But there is another and
equally well-established use of the word marvel, which connotes
that which is distinctly supernatural or closely associated with
the vague realms of unknown possibilities. It has always desig-
nated the impossible, the incredible, the miraculous. Komance
and legend are full of this use :
i4Trevisa, V, 267-9.
iBCaxt. S. of Aym., p. 137.
18 Nightingale (of Trouble-all), in B. Jonson's Barthol. Fair, III, 2.
IT King Henry IV, B, IV, 3, 96.
12 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS.
Now yc, J^at wvllyS wondorcs her, hearkened maruayle.
How I>at chykl with a foiuies fere Dede batayle,i8
or,
Forth pe meruaile of the greal be don.io
Often it is employed thus to designate the magical machines of
sorcery :
pis solere was be sorsry selcuthely fouudid,
Made for a niervall to mecne with engine;
Twenti tamed oliphants turned it aboute.20
Especially rich in examples of the application of the word to
the miraculous is the old literature of the Church. The Golden
Legend, for instance, knows many such. The dissipation of
marvels in which the saints, say St. Brandon or St. ]\Iargaret,
indulged, puts many a secular romance to shame. Eight centuries
later Shakespeare is not nearly so fond of this use of the term.
Schmidt cites only a few cases.-^ The revival of romance in the
eighteenth century saw the entrance of this usage into a new
favor, to which Fanny Burney bore witness, somewhat sarcas-
tically, when she wrote in her Preface to Evelina: "Let me,
therefore, prepare for disappointment those who, in the perusal
of these sheets, entertain the gentle expectation of being trans-
ported to the fantastic regions of Romance, where Fiction is
colored by all the gay tints of luxurious Imagination, where
reason is an outcast, and where the sublimity of the Marvellous
rejects all aid from sober Probability. ' '
No illustration is needed of the present use of the word in
this specific sense of the supernatural.
It may now be remarked with considerable emphasis that
these uses of the terra marvellous are not peculiar to the English
language. The same word in the Latin languages and its equiva-
lent in the German tongues are found, peculiarly enough, in
each case to carry the same variety of connotation. The familiar
and the more sublime uses, the popular and more learned
"fringes" of association, on the one hand, and the connotation
of the merely unusual or of the distinctly supernatural, of the
IS Oclon., 903, Sarr.
10 Arth. a. Merl, 4293. Kolb.
20 TVars of Alex., 5291. Ashmol.
2i Hamlet, I, 2, 195.
INTRODUCTION. 13
naturally extraordinary or of the impossible and incredible, on
the other hand, are all to be found in the Romance and Germanic
languages alike. Littre, for example, defines merveille as ' ' Chose
qui cause de 1 'admiration " ; such, e.g., as the Seven Wonders of
the World. Again, in the next subdivision of his definition, we
read " Familierement. Ce n'est pas grande merveille, ou, par
ironic, voila une belle merveille, ou, elliptiquement, belle mer-
veille, belles merveilles, se dit pour rabaisser une chose, une
action que quelqu'un veut faire passir pour admirable." The
connotation of the supernatural is referred to thus: "Chose qui,
excitant retonnement, parait depasser les forces de la nature";
and under merveillenx he writes: " L 'intervention d'etres sur-
naturels comme dieux, anges, demons, genies, fees, dans les
poemes et autres ouvrages d 'imagination. "-
Here, then, is an interesting state of affairs. Quite univers-
ally the civilized languages seem to unite in attributing to their
respective equivalents of the word wonder, or marvel, a similar
set of variations in meaning. In each case these variations run
from the sublimely intensive to the familiar, and from the super-
natural to the unusual but possible. Such a verbal fact as this,
with its hint of a mental trait common to the race, might,
a priori, seem rich in suggestion; and it carries us naturally
forward to an inquiry into the mental states and experiences
symbolized in these equivalent words. It may be that such an
investigation will bring to us a realization of the way in which the
mind, receiving and working over the observations of the senses,
has come, consciously or unconsciously, to apply to two sets of
phenomena, supposedly widely different in origin, and even
diametrically opposed, a single term, which it uses with equal
facility for the familiar and the prodigious. Does the history of
a word here, as is the case with other words and other subjects,
contain some vague but suggestive testimony as to the origin
and nature of the metaphysical conception ?-3 In the second
chapter we shall recur to this question.
22 For similar usage in other languages it is only necessary to turn to
the dictionaries, s. v. Wxmdcr in German; maraviqUa in Italian; miror,
minis, admirabiUs, in Latin; tfan/xdfw, ^aO^a, etc., in Greek.
23 Compare below, p. 92. On the differentiation of wonderful and ?)!t7r-
vellous, see below, p. 75.
CHAPTER I.
GREEK CRITICISM OF FICTION AND MARVEL.
Outline of method — The philosophical doubt: (a) the
earlier expostulation with myth; (b) Pindar and the 'Charis
Doctrine'; (c) Xenophanes; (d) Empedocles; (e) Plato —
Philosophical attempts to explain the marvel in myth: (a) the
allegorists; (b) Euhemerism — The beginnings of literary criti-
cism proper: (a) Aristotle; (b) Dionysius of Halicarnassus ;
(c) 'Demetrius'; (d) Plutarch; (e) 'Longinus' — Minor phil-
osophers, rhetoricians, etc. — Conclusion : eight general points.
To Greek philosophy the presence of the marvellous in Homer
and in Greek mythology in general was a cause of constant worry.
From Xenophanes to Simplicius the philosophic line was haunted
by the unquiet spirit of an inability to acquiesce in the Homeric
airiOava. All other elements of the epic were accepted with a
religious enthusiasm and implicit faith. Indeed, everything, from
the ideal conduct of government to the proper way of turning a
horse,^ might be, and was, by many an early 'saint' or later
sophist, deduced from the Homeric rule; but from Xenophanes
down, philosophers and the sons of philosophers, nay the edu-
cated class at large, found their piety forever disturbed by the
airCdava. Along with the blind and errant struggle toward a
right adjustment of the Homeric fictions to life and literature,
this restless doubt takes its way from the palmiest age of Greek
thought, through checkered centuries, to the closing of the schools
by Justinian. Like some new stream striving to find its way
through obstructions to a clear and open course, and making
trial of each turn and twist, now this depression and again that,
so the Greek persuasion that all was not right with the marvellous
and impious stories of the ancient bard makes many a turn and
counter before it discovers the only possible adjustment, — a
literary criticism that will, in marking out the peculiar territory
of the literature of power, provide therein for the proper use
and place of the wonderful and impossible.
1 See Xenophon 's satirical remarks in the Banquet, § iv.
GBEEK CRITICISM OF FICTION AND MAEVEL. 15
For such a solution the search was not only often misdirected ;
it was also unsystematic. In the whole course of discussion the
problem was never exhaustively stated, never categorically in-
vestigated. Throughout the discussion the marvellous was seldom
separated from the broader category of fiction. Furthermore,
problems of literary justification of the use of fiction, and so of
the marvellous, were attacked as problems in ethical and histor-
ical justification. In the mass of the resulting confusion it is
not strange that the simple, impartial question, ''What has
been the evolution of the literary use, especially in the older
poets, of the untrue?" w^as preceded by the biased question,
' ' How can we make the old and impious poetic usage harmonize
with our present standards of truth and piety?" The ancient
critic argued from two incompatible premises, — that the older
poets always spoke truthfully and piously, and that the critic's
own vision was always true and pious. When particular cases
revealed the contradiction in these premises the critic had either
to deny the universality of the first premise, or confess the error
of his own deepest intuition, or gloss the premises into harmony.
At first he was surprised into a denial of tradition ; later he
was scared into apologetics and confusion, lest the quaking
ground of truth be destroj^ed under his feet. In that confusion
the marvellous as such, i.e., as differentiated from fiction, was
mentioned casually rather than categorically. Often the notice
was fragmentary, — incidental to a discussion of truth in general.
Often it occurred as a mere illustration of a theme. Often it
was merely tentative, — a wonder at a wonder, or a ' When-I-was-a-
child-I-believed-as-a-child '-statement, as when Philostratus says :
Hat? /j.€v yap cov en iiriarevov toZ? roiovTOfi ^ kul Kare/xvOo-
Xoyet, fie rj tltOtj 'y^apL€VTQ)'i avra eTraSovcra Kai Ti Kal KXaiovaa
CTT ivioa avTcov^ fxeipuKiov Be jevofievo^; ovk ajSaaaviaTco^ at^drjv
')(^pT]vai TrpoaSe^eaOaL ravTU.^
But from the formless mass of these notices the account of
Greek criticism of the marvellous must be patched together.
Some men indeed, Plato and the rest, made a great hue and cry
over the fictions of the poet ; and so came a fine quarrelling back
and forth between the poet and sage, — though to be sure the sage,
Philostratus, Heroic Dialogue, §668 (ed., Kayser-Teubner) .
16 STUDIES IN THE MAIiVELLOJJS.
being after all the, more irritable of the two, blew the louder in
that cacophony. It will be convenient first to gather the notices
from this source; and an examination of Xenophanes, Era-
pedocles, and Plato will give us a fair idea of the general nature
of the problem of fiction and the marvellous in literature as it
confronted the early philosophers. In the course of the whole
matter, however, Greek intelligence, proving itself not very
different from that of a modern apologist, found, of course, a
ready compromise in allegorical interpretation. Anaxagoras, or
was it Theagenes of Rhegium^, first began this sin to cover a sin,
this lie to habilitate a lie; and each lie begot successive lies in
the most approved fashion of such theological vagaries, until
Alexandria was full of the useless spawn, which ceased not even
with Hypatia. The long and futile tale of this attempt at adjust-
ment by means of the allegory may be sufficiently illustrated by
gathering the loci from Anaxagoras and the earlier school, who
began it all, from Plato who deprecated it, and from Maximus
Tyrius, Porphyry, and Julian, who may serve as examples of the
Neoplatonic devotion to this, the most palpable of expedients.
After these Euhemerus and his followers must be briefly men-
tioned. In the fourth place, Aristotle, Plutarch, and Longinus,
with two or three of lesser name, will form another class, — the
most important of all, since they were happy enough to come
nearest to a final and correct adjustment of the matter. Finally,
passing away from philosophy proper, that other wearisome line
of criticism, the Alexandrian and Byzantine, must be glanced at.
Hermogenes, Apthonius, Theon, and Photius will serve to illus-
trate this class.
Such they are — philosophers, sophists, and scientists, theo-
logians and rhetoricians — all haunted by this flaw in the epics, —
TO, airiOava. They all took up the search for a solution ; and,
because each sort answered in a characteristic fashion, the above
classification of their answers has been deemed more convenient
to a presentation of the unsystematic mass of criticism than
would be a scheme based strictly upon chronological sequence.
To begin, then, with the philosophical doubt, and the quarrel
which came therefrom between poet and sage ! Xenophanes, the
3 See below, pp. 31-32.
GREEK CRITICISM OF FICTION AND MARVEL. 17
Eleatic of the sixth century before Christ, stands out as the first
to make much of the philosophic objection to m}i;h and marvel
in Homer. But before him there had been grumblings. The
gradual separation of Greek philosophy and religion from their
combination in myth, and their differentiation one from another,
was marked first of all by an ethical attack upon the blasphemous
deeds and characters attributed to the gods. It is important to
insist that this first attack was not, primarily, an attack directed
by love of fact against the marvellous elements in myths; but
rather a moral expostulation with those circumstances, marvel-
lous and otherwise, of Greek story, that ill harmonized with a
pure and sublime conception of diety. The marvel was morally, +
rather than rationally, impossible. In place of such disgraceful
stories as that of Ares and Aphrodite, or those of the amours of
even the highest gods ; in place of the boastings of Zeus, the thefts
of Hermes, or the insatiate war-god 's cries on the field of Ilium,—
a new and less anthropomorphic idea of the divinities early began
to make its way. Solon and Theogonis, in the sixth and seventh
centuries, are said to have renounced the fabulous myths of
Homer and Hesiod, and to have anticipated the philosophers
proper by setting up a system which rested on ethical and meta-
physical principles.'' Alcmaeon, who flourished in the middle of
the sixth century and was a pupil of Pythagoras, maintains in
the fragment of his treatise (said to be the first) on natural
philosophy {(pvaiKovXoryov) preserved by Diogenes Laertius, that
"about things invisible, and things mortal, the gods alone have a
certain knowledge ; but men may form conjectures. ' '^ Here indeed
is a piece of early skepticism, on the part of a philosopher, which,
though it may not contain a direct criticism of the marvel-mjths,
yet indicates a fecund ground for the growth of such observation.
Heraclitus, too, at the close of the same century, recognized the
limits of human knowledge when he declared that the people did
not know the real nature of the gods and heroes." This is that
4 Egger, Hist. Crit. Grec, 2d eil., p. 92.
^ Uepl tQ>v a<t>avlwv, irepl tCjv dvtiTwv cracp-qveiav fiiv Oiol (xovri us 8' avOpwirois
T€KiJ.aip€<Teai.—Diog. L, VIII, 83; Diels, Fraffm. Vorsokr., Frg. I.
^Kal TO(s dyd\p.a(Ti di TovrioiaLv iGx°vT<^i- okoTov €[ ris Ufwiffi. \6(rx'7>'ew)tTO <oJ/
TL yivihcTKwv eeovs ovd' i^puas oI'tiv^s elaiy — Diels, Fragm. Vorsokr, Frao- V
Cf. Frag. CXXVIII. , r. •
18 STUDIES IN THE MABVELLOUS.
same philosopher whom Diogenes reports as having said that
Plomer and Arehiloehus should have been driven from the games,
apparently because their learning did not, according to Ilera-
clitus, inform the mind of the one, true, all-ruling ideaJ
But these early grumblings of law-givers and philosophers are
shared by a man of quite another stamp, — the lyric poet, Pindar.
"Pindare lui-meme, ce lyrique si enthousiaste, Pindare, qui
definit la sagesse une science innee (<7o<^o9 6 ttoXXo. elBoo^; (f)va) ,
c'est-a-dire ime science donnee a I'ame par la faveur du ciel,
Pindare neanmoins n'est pas exempt de doutes sur les dieux de
rOlympe. "^ "Verily," cries the poet, "many things are won-
drous, and haply tales decked out with cunning fables beyond the
truth make false men's speech concerning them. For Charis,
who maketh all things sweet for mortal men, by lending honour
unto such maketh oft the unbelievable thing to be believed;
but the days that follow after are the wisest witnesses. Meet
it is for a man that concerning gods he speak honourably; for
the reproach is less."* And then the ode continues by substi-
tuting for the old disgraceful story of Pelops a new version
more flattering to the honour of the gods. Such a performance
as this,^° is, in its subject at least, if not in its beauty, quite a
part of the philosophical grumble. In the doctrine of Charis,
however, Pindar is centuries ahead of his time. This doctrine,
though it breathes something of the rationalistic air of our
philosophers, and is advanced more as an accusation than as a
defense of the fictions of the poet, contains, nevertheless, the first
suggestion of the proper attitude of literary criticism toward
the use of the marvellous in literature. This is not the ethical
attitude of the natural philosopher; it is the aesthetic attitude
of the poet. Charis, beauty, says Pindar, beauty of presenta-
tion, lends belief to the unbelievable, makes the impossible pos-
sible. He is not yet ready to say that Charis renders the
marvellous legitimate to the hand of the poet: it only makes
possible a deception which must be guarded against, and to the
7Diog. L., IX, I.
8 Egger, Hixt. Crit. Grec, p. 92.
9 0. I., 42 ff., Tr., E. Myers, Odes of Pindar, London 1899, p. 4.
10 For another of the same kind, see 0. IX, 35 ff.
GBEEK CRITICISM OF FICTION AND MARVEL. 19
nature of which "the days that follow are the wisest witnesses."
In another passage the same point of view is occupied with regard
to the fame of Odysseus; and there, since the impious applica-
s tion of unworthy characters to the gods is absent, the tone is
somewhat less philosophical and more purely aesthetic. The
passage occurs in Nem. VII, 20ff: "Now I have suspicion that
the fame of Odysseus is become greater than his toils, through
the sweet lays that Homer sang; for over the feigning of his
winged craft something of majesty abideth, and the excellence
of his skill persuadeth us to his fables unaware. "^^ The criti-
cism of the untrue and unbelievable in literature, which is
here shadowed forth in what may, for convenience sake, be
called the ' Charis Doctrine, ' comes thus as a suggestion from the
days long before literary criticism grew to a separate and con-
scious discipline. For our purpose, it is, perhaps, the most
notable locus to be found before Aristotle.
Literature is indeed a fragment of fragments. One realizes
that with peculiar vividness as he turns the pages of Diels^- and
Karsten.^3 j^ ^.j^g century that intervened between the years
when Thales was starting a physical philosophy in place of the
old mythical cosmology, and the days of the Samian Pythagoras^*
and Xenophanes the Eleatic, many an animadversion must have
been directed against the fabulous theology of Homer and
Hesiod.i^ Yet from all those years our literary remains are so
meagre that it is not until Xenophanes is reached that the
mumblings of the time, caught in the references noted in the
previous paragraph, break into clear and unmistakable speech.
With him the ethical objection takes the form of a definite and
reiterated charge of anthropomorphism against Homer and
Hesiod. Homer and Hesiod, he says, have attributed to the gods
everything that by men is held disgraceful and blameworthy,—
iiMyers, Odes of Pindar, p. 127.
12 H. Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsolratiker, Berlin 1903.
13 Karsten, Philosophonnn Grcrcorum Veterum Reliqui(e, Amstclodami
1830-8. For a convenient English edition, see Fairbanks, A., The First
Philosophers of Greece, London 1898.
i-t For Pythagoras' criticism, see Diog. L., VIII, 19.
15 6'/"., e.g., Hecata'us (Herod. II, 143). See Gomperz, T., Greek Thinkers,
tr., Magnus-Berry, Scribners 1905, sub. Hecatceus.
20 STUDIES IN THE MABVELLOUS.
theft, deception, and adultery.^" Men think the gods were born
as men were born, and that they have form, countenance, and
habit such as mortals have.^^ And if animals had hands where-
with to fashion images, as men have done, they would give to the
gods animal forms like their owti ; and the gods of horses would
have the shapes of horses, those of oxen the shape of oxen.^^ But,
in truth, he observes, there is but one supreme God ; and He is
like mortals in neither form nor mind.^" There could be no clearer
charge against the poets and popular belief — hardly a completer
statement of Xenophanes' own conception of the sublimity of the
deity — than is conveyed in observations of this kind.
For a criticism of the marvellous in myth, such ethical objec-
tions to the vulgar anthropomorphism of Homeric story are
obviously more than a fertile field. They actually include, as a
part of the wider moral view which is concerned with all im-
proprieties of deific character, the particular cases the impro-
priety of which is traceable to foolish exaggerations or impossible
fictions. The marvellous is by its very nature part and parcel of
the ethical irrationalism against which Xenophanes and his suc-
cessors lift their voices. Indeed, in the twenty-first fragment,
Xenophanes distinctly mentions certain marvels, such as the
battles of Titans, Giants, and Centaurs, which he contemptuously
calls fictions of the ancients (TrXda/xara roiv irporepcov) and
would exclude from the tales told at feasts for the entertain-
'* Jldm-a Ofo'is a.vidy)Kav "Ofi.r]p6s d' 'UaioSds re
6ffaa Trap avdpu)Troi<riv dvddea Kal ipbyoi icrrl^
Kal irXtiffT i4>dtf^a.vT0 deCiv i6fp.i(TTta epya,
kX^itthv, fioi-x^vtiv re Kal aW-^\ovi diraTeveiv.
— Karsten, op. cit., I.Frg. 7.
" 'AXXa fipoTol SoK^vffi deovi ytwaa-dai —
Tr)v (T(f>tTip-r)v iadfjTa t ix^'-^ pjop<t>-fiv re S^fias re.
-Karsten I, Frg. 5.
'* 'AXX' efroi X«'P<^^ V f'X'"' P^^^ V^ X^j-res,
^ ypiij/ai x^^P^'^'^'^ **^ ep7* reXeiv &irep Ai/dpes,
twiroi lUv 6' iirvoiffi, ^6es S4 rt ^ovfflv onoToi,
Kal re Oewv Id^ai iypa<t)Ov Kal ffu/xar iirolovv
Toiavd , ol6i> wep Kal avrol S^fxa^ elxov Sfwiov-
" VAi debs fv re Oeoiai Kal dvOpunroicri p-^yiaroi,
oire 5^^ai Ovr^rolaiv opx)Lio% oUre vb-qp-a.
—Karsten I, Frg. 6.
— Karsten I, Frg. 1.
GEEEK CRITICISM OF FICTION AND MARVEL. 21
ment of the company.^" But the conclusion of the fragment
(^Oecov 8e Trpofirjdeirjv alev^ etc.) shows that the objection to these
marvels was still ethical, — such battles were poor witnesses of
the justice of the gods.
Literary criticism is being trundled by philosophy. But it is
interesting to observe that this early promise of a literary
criticism occurs partly in the form of a judgment against the
marvellous and unbelievable character of much of the earliest
literature. Such a circumstance at least gives a notable genealogy
to any criticism which intends to investigate the use of the
wonderful in literature.
Empedocles, teaching the persistence of all things, and that
birth and death are only changes in the round, puts love in the
midst as the dynamic principle, and says that men call it Delight,
or Aphrodite : TrjOocrvvrjv /caXeoyre? iTrcovvfMov ^8' 'A<f)po8iTT]v.*^
From the four elements and their combinations spring all things,
trees and men and women and animals, birds and fish, and the
gods themselves, long-living and richest in honor.^- These four
elements men call Zeus, Hera, Aidoneus and Nestis.-^ In the
beginning, parts of animals sprang from the earth : ' ' many heads
sprouted up without necks, and naked arms went wandering
forlorn of shoulders, and solitary eyes were straying destitute of
foreheads."-* These parts, wandering about, came together in
haphazard fashion, whence all sorts of strange forms, — double-
faced, double-breasted, man-like before and ox-like behind, or the
bodies of men with the head of cattle.-^ And of the making of
men and women, of the conflict of love and strife in forming all
these and the universe in general, many more examples might
be drawn from Empedocles' IIEPI $Y2Efi2. Throughout the
fragments of this work (Diels enumerates one hundred and
*" OtjTi fidxcLS SUTreiv Tit'tii'ojv ov8i TiyavTiiji'
ovdi Tt KevTavpwv^ irXafffiara tQv irpoT^pojv,
ij (TTcio'tas, 0X€56i'as toFs ov5^v xPV^^^ tveari-
Oewv 5k TrpojUTj^e^Tj;' aliv «xf' oi'yo-ST)v. — Karsten I, Frg. 21.
21 Diels, Frg. 17.
22 7b., Frg. 21.
23 Ih., Frg. 6.
24 ih., Frg. 57, Tr., SjTnomls, The Greek Poets, Vol. I, Ch. VII.
25 lb., Frg. 61.
22 STUDIES IN THE MAEVELLOUS.
eleven) is evident the rationalizing tendency illustrated in the
quotations above. "With something of allegory, as in the ease of
the Four Elements just noted, there is a great deal of theory,
physical and metaphysical, which replaces the old fabulous cos-
mology. It is especially interesting to observe at what pains he
is to account for the marvellous mixed-forms of legend and
tradition.
But this rationalizing tendency, in which he is quite at one
with the early natural philosophers, illustrates but one side of
the character of this strangest of men. If this were his only side,
it would perhaps be more proper to deal with him in company
with the allegorists. Those other and more interesting aspects of
the man, by virtue of which he stands out from the shadows of
the past as a romantic figure crowned with fillets and luxuriant
garlands, walking in majestic purple through "the great city hard
by the yellow stream of Acragas" — as a reveller in mysticism
and magic, whom Gorgias often saw at his secret rites — as a
thaumaturgical pretender, half -charlatan and self-confessed
god, — those are the characters of the man built forth in his
KA0APMOI. Here, indeed, between the two aspects of the man,
is a strange contradiction. As Rohde puts it: "Empedokles
vereinigt in sich in eigenthiimlicher Weise die niicliternsten
Bestrebungen einer nach Kraften rationellen Naturforschung
mit ganz irrationalem Glauben und theologischer Speculation.
Bisweilen wirkt ein wissenschaftlicher Trieb auch bis in
den Bereich seines Glaubens hiniiber. Zumeist aber stehen in
seiner Vorstellungswelt Theologie und Naturwissenschaft un-
verbunden neben einander. "-" Symonds has hit off this con-
tradictory character of the man to still better effect. There are
men, as he says, "in whom two natures cross — the poet and the
philosopher, the mountebank and the seer, the divine and the
fortune-teller, the rigorous analyst and the retailer of old wives'
tales. But none have equalled Empedocles, in whose capacious
idiosyncrasy the most opposite qualities found ample room for
co-existence, who sincerely claimed the supernatural faculties
which Paracelsus must have only half believed, and who lived
at a time when poetry and fact were indistinguishably mingled.
26 Rohde, E., Psyche, Leipzig 1903, II, 174-175.
GREEK CRITICISM OF FICTION AND MARVEL. 23
and when the world was still absorbed in dreams of a past golden
age, and in rich foreshadowings of a boundless future."-^
And it is before the wonder-side of this man, before this
nature which is all compact of love for the marvellous, that we
naturally pause in the history of wonder. For the criticism of
the marvellous no contributions can be found in what remains to
us of the great Lustral Poem. Still, Empedocles is a name of
prime importance in the development of a criticism of the won-
derful. The contradictions in the character of the man give a
living example of the opposing forces at work in the mass of the
people of that century. And from these opposite forces — the
one, a gathering impetus of rationalism, invading the ancient and
ever-ready credulity of the other — contemporary criticism derived
its nature, — somewhat timid and tentative, rarely as clear and
certain as the cry of Xenophanes, and with its stricter science
ever offset by a copious mysticism. Again, the figure of Emped-
ocles is an illuminating introduction to the teachings of his
greater but younger contemporary, Plato. Because of their con-
tradictions of character a comparison may be drawn between
these two. Their rationalizing doctrines are to be reconciled with
their mysticism and belief in the marvellous by remembering the
nature of the times in which they lived — transitional, engaged in
the breaking up of mythology into its separate disciplines of
philosophy, religion, and science — and by remembering also that
they were -rationalizing a popular mythology beyond which they
caught glimpses of a still greater marvel.
The transition, then, from Empedocles to Plato, is easy.
Postponing for a moment the consideration of Plato's criticism
of the use of the marvellous in literature, we may examine the
contradictions in his general attitude toward the more fabulous
elements of the culture of his time.
Upon Plato,*^ living in an age that was beginning to deny its
mythic fancies and yet was ready to wonder at the alleged marvels
and miracles of an Empedocles, and content to admit that strange
man's claim of divinity, the clouds of mythology do indeed still
27 Symonds, Grlc. Poets, I, Ch. VII.
28 References to Plato are as follows: Greek text, — paging and letter-
ing of Stcphaniis; translation, — Jowett, Dialogues of Plato, 5 vols., 3d ed.,
by volume and page.
24 STUDIES IX THE MABVELLOUS.
rest.-" In his attitude, or rather, to be exact, his attitudes,
toward dreams, ghosts, magic, clairvoyancy, witchcraft, the
existence of the gods, and mythology in general, there is an un-
certainty, a blowing now this way, now that, which may indeed
be partly explained by those natural changes in belief and out-
look that take place in the course of an individual's intellectual
development, or by those variations in exposition called esoteric
and exoteric, the cause of which is the necessity of tempering the
preachment to the capacities of different audiences : or it may be
repeated, by those fond of the saying, that it is often difficult to
determine which is Plato 's opinion, which that of an interlocutor.
But the nice parallel between this particular philosopher's ap-
parent indecision, which at times permits direct contradictions,^"
and the unsettled state of the minds of men in general of that age,
is too alluring and obvious to be passed over. For a fact, the
prevailing psychosis of Plato, whenever he regarded the mar-
vellous, was not of that clear and stubbornly insistent make found
in our experimental philosophers : it was rather of that type in
which an imagination subtly apt to mystical beauties exists side
by side with an intellect keenly on the leash for strict and search-
ing criticism. Poet-philosopher he was; and in that, too, he was
a child of his age.
A few examples may illustrate this indecision of attitude
toward the marvellous. Toward dreams, for instance, and
divination by dreams, Plato seems to have exhibited in general
a discouraging f ront^^ ; moreover, the Timaeus gives for them a
material explanation.^- Yet Plato represents Socrates as rightly
very scrupulous concerning the behest of the dream that bade him
to "make music. "^^ Of ghosts, and other apparitions, to change
the illustration, his speech is almost uniformly slighting, and
in an unbelieving tone.^* Yet in the second example {Phaedo,
81) he makes direct use of the popular belief in order to lend
zejowett, III, 421.
80 Compare Cicero, De Natura Deorum, Lib. I, § XII.
sijowett, III, 493-494 {Timaeus 71-72); V, 297 (Latvs 909-910).
32 7b., Ill, 465 {Timaeus 45-46).
33 7b,, II, 198 {Phaedo 60). Compare Plutarch, On Hearing Poems, §2.
34 76., V, 120, 297 {Laws 738, 910); II, 224 {Phaedo 81). Compare
also III, 493 {Timaeus 71).
GREEK CRITICISM OF FICTION AND MARVEL. 25
weight to his theory. Indeed, this passage shows well the poetic
and imaginative method of Plato, by which he establishes rela-
tions between popular superstitions and his o^vti philosophical
speculations, while discrediting wholly, or in part, the supersti-
tions. Magic, clairvoyancy, and witchcraft, he thinks, belong to
the prophets and priests, who may know more about them than
common people. They are things concerning which it is hard to
know anything for certain. Plato is not quite prepared to
denounce them as pure deception and illusion. But their practice
and belief by the common people is roundly condemned, and in
another place a material explanation of the whole matter is
offered.3^ Plato believes in gods, demi-gods, and heroes. Yet he
speaks ironically of the popular belief in them, and says that we
know their names, nay, their very existence, only from what the
poets fable of them. Their names are the inventions of men. We
know nothing of them. And yet as a philosopher he argues at
length for their existence, and says the ancients were nearer than
the moderns to the gods.^« In prophecy, and in madness of the
inspired sort, the "noblest of the arts," he also believes.^^ Of
mythology he holds that much is a picture of the probable, not of
the actually real. In accordance with this belief he does not hesi-
tate to devise myths of his own for didactic purposes. Again, he
would account for some part of myth by attributing to the
ancients a figurative way of speaking. But this suggestion of
rationalization remains abortive; and Plato professes he has no
time to waste upon the foolishness of the allegorists. Yet, to
what in mythology appears to him ethically unfit, he objects as
untrue. He is concerned, indeed, less with the strictly marvellous,
than with the ethically base in custom and manner, word and
performance. Gorgans and Pegasi he calls "inconceivable and
portentous natures," but he does not clearly object to their
employment in tales.^®
35 7b., Ill, 493-494. Compare p. 409; V, 322. Compare V, 28, 296;
III, 43. ' f , , ,
36 /b., Ill, 76; II, 120-121; V, 96, 100, 108, 120, 122, 183, 231, etc.;
Index under demi-gods, etc.; I, 340-341; III, 528, 45; IV, 55; V, 270, 275ff.
37 lb., I, 450, 473.
ssRep. 614 ff., Statesman 269 ff., PJiaedrus 259, Gorgias 523, etc.; Theae-
tetus 180, cf. Ill, 61, 493; II, 78-79; III, 60 ff.; V, 421; III, 75, 307 ff.:
I, 434; III, 530-531. > > , > ,
26 STUDIES IN THE MAEVELLOUS.
It is this ethical objection to the unfit, to that which degrades
the ideal of deity and the moral fibre of the youth, that gives
Plato his point of view for the literary use of fiction.
With Plato the quarrel between poetry and philosophy reaches
its most serious phase. The poets, from whom alone, says Plato,
the existence of the gods is known,^^ and who "have ever
been the great story-tellers of mankind,"*" are formally and
categorically accused of "telling lies, and, what is more, bad
lies." "But when is this fault committed?" asks Adeimantus.
Socrates answers: ""Whenever an erroneous representation is
made of the nature of gods and heroes, — as when a painter paints
a portrait not having the shadow of a likeness to the original."
As examples of such fictions Socrates mentions the stories of
Uranus and Cronus, the battles of the giants, the binding of
Here by Hephaestus, Zeus' punishment of Hephaestus, the
battles of the gods in Homer,*^ ' ' and innumerable other quarrels
of gods and heroes with their friends and relatives." In due
order, then, are given a list of particulars in which the poets have
offended. They have not hallowed the name of God, but have
made him an author of evil ;*- they have represented God chang-
ing and passing into many forms, as a magician might do,
whereas God never changes from his perfection of form;*' nor
would God make by witchcraft any such false representation of
himself or another as the poets represent him doing when he
sends the lying dream to Agamemnon ;** Homer and the other
poets have represented the world below in a most discouraging
light ;*^ they have also pictured the heroes, and even the gods, as
pitifully weeping or foolishly laughing,*" as untruthful, and in-
temperate to the degree of indecency and impiety;*^ witness the
Aphrodite episode, or Achilles' treatment of Hector's corpse at
the tomb of Patroclus, or "the tale of Theseus, son of Poseidon,
•i« Rep. II, 365E.
*<>Iiep. II, 377D.
*i liep. II, 377.378.
*2 Rep. II, 379-380; cf. Democritus, Diels, Frg. 175.
*3R€p. II, 380-381.
**Rep. II, 381-383.
ii^Rcp. Ill, 386-387.
*<--Rep. Ill, 387-389.
*T Rep. Ill, 389-391.
GREEK CRITICISM OF FICTION AND MARVEL. 27
or of Peirithous, son of Zeus, going forth as they did to perpetrate
a horrid rape ; or of anj' other hero or son of a god daring to do
such impious and dreadful things as they falsely ascribe to them
in our day. "*^ " And let us further compel the poets, ' ' Socrates
continues, "to declare either that these acts were not done by
them, or that they were not the sons of gods; — both in the same
breath they shall not be permitted to affirm. ' '*^
Such is the list of formal accusations preferred by Plato in
this famous trial of the poets. It is hardly necessary to point out
that the basis of the charge in each case is the same ethical objec-
tion to immoral representations of deity that had been stirring
during the previous two centuries. •^•' Here the hints of Pindar,
the clarion cry of Xenophanes, and the murmurings of Heracli-
tus are gathered and expanded with due premeditation.
But the immediate purpose of the prosecution gives what
may be called an economic air to the ethical expostulation. The
tremendous influence exercised in the ancient Greek state by
poetry made it necessary, when there was in contemplation a
republic which was designed to be " an imitation of the best and
noblest life,"^^ to deliberate carefully upon the question of the
position of the poet in the prospective city. Plato decides that
the untruthful, impious, and blasphemous habits of the poets,
illustrated in the charges brought against them, do not conduce
to the moral welfare of the youth and citizens of a republic. But
a state cannot stand firm or reach its highest possibilities if its
youth are to be educated by lies and abominations in place of a
pure and sublime representation of the goodness and justice of
the gods. That is an economic, to say nothing of a moral, im-
possibility. Plato, therefore, to insure the stability of his state
48jowett, III, 75.
49 Loc. cit.
60 Indeed, Plato himself is careful to explain that he objects to certain
fictions of Homer and the other poets ' ' not because they are unpoetical,
or unattractive to the popular ear, but because the greater the poetical
charm of them, the less are they meet for the ears of boys and men who
are meant to be free, and who should fear slavery more than death." (Rep.
Ill, 387A, Jowett III, 69.) The passage well illustrates the inveteracy of
Plato's moral view. Fair writing that renders bad fiction pleasant to the
popular (notice the implication) ear is no excuse for the existence of the
passage. All the worse!
51 Laws VII, 817A.
28 STUDIES IN THE MAEVELLOVS.
in the truth and purity of its youth, to realize economic ad-
vantage from etliioal incorruptibility, provides in his ideal city
for "a censorship of the writers of fiction" (^inLaTaTijTeov toi?
This economic censorship of the poets, however, is not intended
to repress all fiction. "Let the censors receive any tale of fiction
which is good, and reject the bad." Plato's quarrel with a tale
is not begun because the tale is untrue, but because it is impiously
untrue. "We will desire mothers and nurses to tell their
children the authorised ones (i.e., fictions) only. Let them
fashion the minds with such tales, even more fondly than they
would the body with their hands; but most of those which are
now in use must be discarded. ' '^^ And again, speaking of myth-
ology, he says, ' * Because we do not know the truth about ancient
times, we make falsehood as much like truth as we can, and so
turn it to account."^* Such a recognition of the good uses of
fiction shows clearly enough that whatever may have been Plato's
real belief touching the m>i;hs, he approved of their use in litera-
ture so long as a careful censorship set before the public only
those tales calculated by their moral propriety to elevate the
minds of the people. Moreover, Plato's own repeated invention
and use of the fable for purposes of instruction, one of the most
striking features of his teaching,^'* is proof obvious of his moral
approval of such literary usage.
There is then, in a word, not only an ethical objection to
fiction, but also an ethical recommendation. In such recom-
mendation lay the germ of a possible development of an aesthetic
theory of the technical propriety of fiction ; but the negating zeal
attendant upon the prohibition was so great as to quite over-
shadow the promise latent in the more positive permissicm. It
remained for a more prosaic successor and keener analyst to take
that technical step from the ethical commendation.
52JBep. II, 377B.
63 Sep. II, 377C.
^*Eep. II, 382D.
60 67., e.g., the myth of Er {Republic X, 614ff.), or of the creation of
man (Protag. 320Cfif.), or of the soul (Phaedr. 24r)-2.')7), or of the origin
of love (Symp. 191, 192). For others, see Jowett, Index, Vol. V, 475, sub
Myth. For Plato's expressed attitude ("Myth more interesting than ar-
gument") toward these fictions, see Protag. 320C; Jowett IV, 431-433.
GREEK CEITICISM OF FICTION AND MABVEL. 29
Finally, in this economic-ethical consideration of fiction in
general, what of the marvellous, that particular kind or degree
of fiction ? In many cases, the battles of the giants, for instance,
or Hephaestus' capture of Aphrodite and Ares, the objectionable
fiction possesses elements that are obviously marvellous ; more-
over, strictly speaking, all god-stories are instances of marvellous
fiction, and Plato himself so calls them in the Euthyphro.^^ But
Plato does not, as we have noticed, object to all the fictions of
mythology; nor, where there are elements that stand, by contrast
to the very matter-of-fact conduct of much in mythic fable, as
strikingly wonderful, is the casus belli the marvel so much as the
moral. In two of the charges preferred against the poets there is
indeed mention of particular marvel-elements; and the mention
is in each case accompanied with a slur. * * Shall I ask you whether
God is a magician, and of a nature to appear insidiously now in
one shape, and now in another?" asks Socrates.^" And a little
further on he follows the matter up with a second question :
"But although the gods are themselves unchangeable, still by
witchcraft and deception they may make us think that they
appear in various forms ?"^® Magic and witchcraft are, indubit-
ably, marvels ; but in spite of the slur with which they are men-
tioned, and in spite of Plato's denunciation elsewhere^^ of their
practice, no distinct objection to them qua marvellous and im-
5G Soc. May not this be the reason, Euthyphro, why I am charged with
impiety — that I cannot away with these stories about the gods? and there-
fore I suppose that people think me wrong. But, as you who are well in-
formed about them approve of them, I cannot do better than assent to your
superior wisdom. What else can I say, confessing as I do, that I know
nothing about them? Tell me, for the love of Zeus, whether you really
believe they are true.
Euth. Yes, Socrates; and things more wonderful {davfiaa-iurfpa) still,
of which the world is in ignorance. — Euthyphro 6A, Jowett II, 79-80.
5- Eep. II, 380D.
^»Bep. II, 381E.
50 Cf. Eep. X, 602C-D; Laws X, 909-910; Laus XI, 933. In a pas-
sage in the Eepublic {Eep. II, 364-367), Orphic magic is denounced, and
those passages in the poets which teach that the gods may be controlled
by the arts of men, are deprecated. But the objection is there, again, not
to the marvel, but to the immoral influence of such passages upon youthful
minds. {Eep. II, 365A.) Indeed, Plato himself, though fully aware of
the unnaturalness of magic and the like, and inclined to disbelief ( vid.
Laws XI, 933A), was yet by no means sure such things were wholly illu-
sions. ' ' Now it is not easy to know the nature of all these things (sorcer-
ies, incantation, magic knots, etc)," he continues in the passage just noted.
* ' Nor if a man do know can he readily persuade others to believe him. ' '
30 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS.
possible is raised here. In the Fhacdrus, in a passage to which we
shall recur in speaking of the allegorists, Plato speaks of Gorgons
and Pegasi, Hippocentaurs and Chimeras dire, "and numberless
other inconceivahh and portentous natures. '"^° But there is no
literary criticism in the passage.
The sum of the matter, then, is that Plato, in direct criticism
of the marvellous as such, offers no more than do his predecessors.
Like them, his objection is more to the ethically irrational than
the naturally impossible; and he surveys in his objections the
whole field of fiction rather than the particular territory of the
Avonderful. But, on the other hand, it must be remembered that
that fiction is the fiction of myth and legend, of god-story and
hero-story, of the two primary and most important forms under-
taken by the marvelling activity. All such fiction is at heart
fabulous ; and, though religious belief in the myth, or an anthro-
pomorphic conduct of the story, may convert wonder to an
illusion of every-day reality, it yet remains true that a criticism
of such fiction, ethical at first, as is natural considering its
religious rather than re-creative force, is the field from which in
later, less believing, and more scientific days a true literary
criticism must spring. Plato sowed that field richly where the
Pre-Socratics had sowed before him. So far he was at one with
them. But he went a step further, as we have shown above. He
gave to certain fiction, to certain stories of those wonderful beings,
the gods, an ethical encouragement. He found for them an
ethical and economic legitimacy. And, moreover, that very
addition of an economic idea was a first step away from the
ethical bondage of literary criticism. It was a lay tendency
springing from the theological preoccupation of the time, and an
adumbration of a criticism which in becoming completely secular
would first achieve literary truth.
Thus, the quarrel between poet and philosopher, based upon a
religious or ethical consideration, came to a head in Plato by his
categorical expansion and uncompromising expression of that
consideration ; thus, too, in Plato, by his addition of an economic
reason, the first step awa^^ from the old theological (juarrel was
taken ; and thus, finally, after having re-sowed and newly marked
00 phaedrus 229E.
GREEK CBITICISM OF FICTION AND MARVEL. 31
the field from which might spring a technical criticism of fiction,
Plato started the growth by an ethical commendation, which, in
turn, was succeeded by an aesthetic judgment from the mouth of
his great pupil.
But before proceeding to Aristotle, who will give us the first,
and almost the last word in the matter, so far as Greek criticism
is concerned, it is necessary to pause a moment and contemplate
two compromises offered in the quarrel of poet and sage by the
philosophers themselves.
In the first place, it was proposed that the myths were,
properly taken, allegories. By this means the morally shocking
and irrational elements could be explained away. To valuable
criticism this compromise, by launching an endless discussion and
interpretation of myths from the unchecked fancies of numberless
"umbratical doctors," was fatal. The absurdities to which the
allegorists became subject are too well known to make their
rehearsal here a matter of moment. The historian Phaborinus
says that Anaxagoras, in the fifth century before Christ, was the
first to declare the Homeric poems an allegory "composed in
praise of virtue and justice. ""^^ According to another report
Theagenes of Rhegium had that doubtful honor.''- Phaborinus
goes on to say that Metrodorus of Lampsacus,*'^ the friend of
Anaxagoras, carried this sort of interpretation further. Plato
mentions Glaucon and Stesimbrotus the Thasian, as sharing with
Metrodorus the allegorical method."* Plato himself, as we have
seen, found no time to investigate this theory of mythology, spoke
of it in slighting fashion, and believed it usually to be introduced
first when "cities have leisure.""^ Xenophon ridicules the alle-
gorical theory by making Socrates poke fun at the pedant
Niceratus (who can recite all of Homer). Socrates compliments
the pedant on being far above the public ballad-singers.
<^'^ Fragmenta E istoricorum Grcecorum (Miiller, C), III, 581, Frg. 26;
quoted by Diog. L. in his Life of Anaxagoras, § VII.
82 See Lobock, Aglaophamus 1, § 20 flf., where the matter of allegorical
interpretation is discussed at length. See also Wolf, Prolog, ad Horn.,
CLXI.
03 Diels, Frag. Forsokr., p. 339.
6* Ion 530C; Jowett, T, 496.
^^Phaedrus 229C-230A; Critias 110 A.
32 STUDIES IN THE MABVELLOUS.
"ArjXov ycip^ €(f>i] 6 ^coKpciTT]^^ OTL ra? xnrovoia'i ovk eiriaravraL. <tv
Se ^Trjcn/x^poTcp t€ kuI ^ Xva^ipidvhpcp koX aXXoi^; TroXXot? iroXii Be-
B(OKa<; apyvpiov^ coare ovSev ae rSiv ttoXXov a^icov Xe\7;^e."**
But in spite of ridicule**^ the doctrine flourished through a long
line of learned names. Among the Neoplatonists, to carry the
matter beyond our present date and have done with it, Porphyry 's
De Aiitro Nympharum is typical. The Emperor Julian, in the
fourth century after Christ, allegorizes the myths after the Neo-
platonic fashion in his orations To the So7i and To the Mother of
the Gods.^^ How the habit crept into Christian commentary, as
in Origen, and how there, as well as in secular literature,"^ it
persisted on through the Middle Ages (and is not dead yet), is a
story as monotonous as it is useless.
The second solution, or compromise, of the philosophical doubt,
may with convenience be mentioned side by side with the alle-
gorical solution, though it was not broached until after the death
of Aristotle. Euhemerus (whose date De Block^° puts approxi-
mately at 330-240 B.C.), with his well-known proposal to refer the
myths to human subjects, shows that by the time of Aristotle men
were ready easily to approach the subject from a strictly secular
point of view. Indeed, De Block thinks that Euhemerus did not
make even a serious, bona fide attempt at a solution. His purpose
was not, says De Block, to discover the truth through an impartial
study of the traditions concerning the gods: his work belongs,
rather, "dans cette categoric d'oeuvres hybrides ou la fiction
sert a developper et a vulgariser quelque systeme de philosophic
politique, morale ou religieuse."^^ In a word the book is a roman
philosophique, one of those fables of the philosophers or liistorians
discussed by Chassang,''- — such as Plato's Atlantis or Xenophon's
"« Xenophon, Banquet III, 6. Cf., also IV, 7, 8, — the celebrated
"onions and wine" passage.
«7 See, e.g., Plutarch, How to Hear Poems, § 4. Ed., Goodwin, "Morals,"
Boston 1883, Vol. 2, p. 54.
«8 Tr., Thomas Taylor, London 1793.
60 Tzetzes, for example. See Saintsbury, Hist. Crit., I, 187.
70 K. De Block, tuhemdre, son Livre et sa Doctrine, Mons 1876.
71/6., p. 53.
72 Chassang, Hist, du Boman etc., Paris 1862.
GBEEE CBITICISM OF FICTION AND MARVEL. 33
Cyropaedia. Nor, in all probability, was Euhemerus the first to
advance the theory that goes by his name.'^
If indeed we are to regard the work of the allegorists and the
euhemerists as appertaining to literary criticism, and Saintsbury
remarks that the allegorical and rationalistic interpretation of
Homer probably constitutes the earliest Greek literary criticism,^*
we must at least acknowledge that so far as a consideration of the
legitimacy of fiction in fine literature and of its proper use and
management is concerned, neither school presents anything at all.
The purpose in the case of either discipline does not embrace such
a consideration in its purview. The purpose is less literary
than it is religious or ethical. Both schools are working under
the old moral impetus. And though they deal constantly with
tales of wonder, there is no sign of an attempt at philosophizing
over, or criticizing, the place of the marvellous in literature. In
offering their solutions of the impious and impossible in myth,
they, like Xenophanes and Plato, are testifying to a time when
the impossible, or at least the morally impossible, in literature,
was regarded as a moral blemish. Here they were at one with
other minds of their times. But, in going beyond an expostulation
to apply a solution, these two schools started an inquiry which in
course of time has become completely secular and scientific, and
bears as its ultimate fruit the present school of ethnological or
comparative mythology. For the Greeks, here, as elsewhere in
their literary criticism, the lack of a comparative view prevented
that realization of the actual nature and value of an element
which the criticism of the present has learned to appreciate from
the knowledge contributed by comparative ethnology.
After disposing of these two attempts at a solution of the origin
and purpose of the myths, the main course of the development
of a criticism of marvellous fiction may be resumed in the work
of Aristotle. The many-sidedness and penetration of the Stagi-
rite's mind is well illustrated by the fact that in spite of his
skeptical attitude as a scientist and philosopher toward the won-
73 De Block, op. cit., p. 65 ff. ; for the successors of Euhemerus, see
Decharme, P., La Critique des Traditions Eeligieuses ches les Grecs, Paris
1904, pp. 381-393.
74 Saintsbury, Hist. Crit., I, 10-11.
34 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS.
derful, which is well illustrated by his remark concerning the
Theogouists' fabulous systems of philosophy to the effect that it
is "not worth while to consider them seriously, "'° he nevertheless
was able, as a literary critic, to survey quite seriously the place
of fiction and the marvellous (to Oavfiaarov) in literature.
Aristotle did not mix his points of view. Instead of declaiming
with Plato a moral anathema against the poets, or, like the
allegorists, proposing for literary faults some convenient panacea
distilled from an extra-technical source, Aristotle immediately
proclaimed that heretofore the sacred character and moral in-
fluence of Homeric and Hesiodic literature had in part prevented
pious criticism from seeing clearly. Against those who decried
poetry as a lie dealing with perversions, instead of representa-
tions, of facts, Aristotle boldly asserted that there is a poetic
truth differing from and transcending historical truth,^® and that
poetry properly describes not only what is, but also what is sg,id
or thought to be, and what ought to be." Indeed, so far did
Aristotle push this view, which has since become well known as
the doctrine of higher reality in art, that, as Professor Saints-
bury remarks,^* fiction and poetry were to him practically
coextensive and synonymous. Aristotle's elaboration of the doc-
trine need not detain us here. Professor Butcher, by the third
chapter of his Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, has
brought all students of the doctrine into his debt for an exhaus-
tive exegesis of those parts of the text which open out this view.
Merely for convenience it may be stated by way of reminder
that Aristotle, in answering the critical objection that the poet
is in the habit of describing the impossible or what is not true to
fact, holds that the impossible may be justified by an appeal to
"•'' It is also interesting in this connection to remember that lukewarm
attitude of Aristotle toward deity and other religious mysteries that won
for him among the early Christians a suspicious neglect. It is remarkable
that from Aristotle, who by reason of his scientific and materialistic char-
acter might have seemed far less likely to do justice in such an affair
than would one of his more imaginative predecessors, came the first real
.iuatification of fiction and the use of the fabulous in literature. Here,
indeed, is a plume in the hat of the empiricists!
70 Poetics IX, 2-6.
TT Poetics, XXV, 1. (All references to the Poetics arc to Butcher's edi-
tion: Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, 3d. ed., 1902.)
'sEist. Crit. I, 31. Cf. Poetics IX, 1-3.
GREEK CRITICISM OF FICTION AND MARVEL. 35
artistic requirements, higher reality (the "ought to be"), or
received opinion.''^ The irrational is justly censured when for its
introduction there is found no inner necessity.^" In a word, as
Aristotle puts it, with direct innuendo to Plato : ' ' The standard
of correctness is not the same in poetry and politics, any more
than in poetry and any other art."^^
The twenty-fifth chapter of the Poetics, that involved piece of
writing in which this view of poetic fiction is expounded, marks
the birth of a true, technical literary criticism of fiction from the
lap of the moral and idealistic philosophy of the previous cen-
turies.*^ It w^ould be strange if there were no notice here of that
heightened or exaggerated degree of fiction called the marvellous.
Such a notice, in the brief note-book manner of the Poetics, is
found in the closing sections of the preceding chapter. The pas-
sage is of such importance as to demand quotation in full. The
author is engaged in noting the points of difference between Epic
and Tragic Poetry. After contrasting the length and metre of
epos and tragedy, he continues: "The element of the wonder-
ful (to Bav/xaa-Tov) is admitted in Tragedy. The irrational
(to aXoyov) , on which the wonderful depends for its chief
effects, has wider scope in Epic poetry, because there the person
acting is not seen. Thus, the pursuit of Hector would be ludicrous
if placed upon the stage — the Greeks standing still and not join-
ing in the pursuit, and Achilles waving them back. But in the
Epic poem the absurdity passes unnoticed. Now the wonderful
is pleasing: as may be inferred from the fact that, in telling a
story, every one adds something startling of his owti, knowing that
his hearers like it. It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets
the art of telling lies skilfully. The secret of it lies in a fallacy.
For, assuming that if one thing is or becomes, a second is or
becomes, men imagine that, if the second is, the first likewise is
-^Poetics, XXV, 17.
^0 Poetics XXV, 19.
Si Poetics XXV, 3.
82 It is of course to be remembered that another stream of criticism —
grammatical and verbal, of Sophist and Rhetorician — which has not been
noted hero because contributing nothing to the subject in hand, was yet
instrumental in bringing to birth the general criticism of Aristotle, and
therefore, in some part at leaet, his particular criticism of fiction. Cf.
Mitchell Carroll, Aristotle's Poetics, C. XXV, Baltimore 1895, pp. 11-12.
36 STUDIES IN THE MABVELLOUS.
or becomes. But this a false inference. Hence, where the first
thing is untrue, it is quite unnecessary, provided the second be
true, to add that the first is or has become. For the mind, know-
ing the second to be true, falsely infers the truth of the first.
There is an example of this in the Bath Scene of the Odyssey.^'
"Accordingly, the poet should prefer probable impossibilities
to improbable possibilities. The tragic plot must not be composed
of irrational parts. Everything irrational should, if possible, be
excluded ; or, at all events, it should lie outside the action of the
play (as, in the Oedipus, the hero's ignorance as to the manner
of Laius' death) ; not within the drama, — as in the Electra, the
messenger's account of the Pythian Games; or, as in the IMysians,
the man who comes from Tegea to Mysia without speaking. The
plea that otherwise the plot would have been ruined, is ridiculous ;
such a plot should not in the first instance be constructed. But
once the irrational has been introduced and an air of likelihood
imparted to it, we must accept it in spite of the absurdity. Take
even the irrational incidents in the Odyssey, where Odysseus is
left upon the shore of Ithaca.®* How intolerable even these might
have been would be apparent if an inferior poet were to treat the
subject. As it is, the absurdity is veiled by the poetic charm with
which the poet invests it. ' '^^
Professor Butcher in commenting on this passage remarks:
"The fiction here intended is, as the context shows, not simply
that fiction which is blended with fact in every poetic narrative of
real events. The reference here is rather to those tales of a strange
and marvellous character, which are admitted into epic more
freely than into dramatic poetry."®" Such an interpretation of
the passage is undoubtedly the right one. To Bavixaarov is an
expression reserved to this chapter; it does not occur in the
wider discussion of general poetic truth contained in the twenty-
fifth section. Moreover, at least two of the illustrations, that from
the Mysians and the following one from the Odyssey, have a
distinct element of marvel. But, for the rest, there is such a
83 See Butcher, op. cit., p. 172 note.
84 Od. XIII, 93ff.
85 Butcher, pp. 95-97 {Poetics XXIV, 8-10).
86 7b., p. 171. Cf., to the same effect. Twining, Aristotle's Treatise on
Poetry, II, 346ff (1789).
GBEEK CRITICISM OF FICTION AND MABFEL. 37
loose handling of the words davfxaarov^ aXoya^ and ahvvara
(the wonderful, irrational, and impossible) that it is hard not
only to determine the exact bearing of the different parts and
illustrations of the paragraphs, but even the exact meaning and
relations of the terms themselves. In spite of these difficulties,
which need not be enlarged upon here, these thirty-odd lines
contain well-nigh the entire gist of all Greek criticism of the
proper use of the marvellous in literature. Some seven points are
made. They must be emphasized in detail.
First of all, there are two general points, which in turn are
followed by five strictly technical observations. After the pre-
liminary statement that the wonderful is admitted in tragedy and
epos, the general nature of wonder is defined as that which relies
for its chief effects upon the irrational. Further than this
analysis of the major element Aristotle does not carry us; but
this simple statement, conveyed in a subordinate clause, is one
which the moral doctors in their haste refused duly to express
as the first step in a proper criticism of the subject. The frag-
mentary character of the essay is well sho\ATi by this rough and
and incomplete analysis of to Oavyiaarov. — Another general
remark is that which notes the universality both of the pleasure
in the wonderful and also of its practice by the raconteur. This
observation, taken with the previous generalization, constitutes
what is practically a hint toward the psychology of wonder;
and in spite of the commonplace character of the two points, they
yet present to the weary searcher for a definite and correlated
criticism a great promise. There is here a recognition of wonder
as a thing omnipresent in life and story-telling, and an admis-
sion of it to a criticism based upon the naturalness of that fact,
instead of an exclusion founded upon a moral preconception, or
upon a permission, like that of Plato's, which is grounded in a
political, non-literary economy. The air of free fact and open-
eyed observation is refreshing after the theological dust, even
though the manner is dryly scientific.
Of strictly technical points, the first in order of the paragraph
is the differentiation of the use of wonder (or at least of the
irrational, which seems to amount to the same thing) in the two
literary kinds, tragedy and epos. Here is something entirely
38 STUDIES IN THE MAEFELLOUS.
new! The differentiation is psychological, as it should be. In
epic poetry there is wider scope for the irrational because the
epos, by presenting only words and associated images to the ear
and eye, falls short of the more uncompromising vividness and
reality of tragedy, which presents its scenes in actual, concrete
forms. In the epic "the person acting is not seen"; therefore,
many a minor absurdity, which would become glaringly ap-
parent in the more realistic presentation of the stage, escapes the
notice of the reader of the epic tale.
' ' Segnius irritant aninios demissa per awreni,
' ' Quam quae sunt oculis sub jecta fidelibus, et quae
' ' Ipse sibi tradit spectator. ' '87
But it is Homer who most of all has led the way in skilful
epic lying. This historical hint, so perfectly free from a puri-
tanical cast, so urbanely recognizing the nature of art, is im-
mediately succeeded by an attempt to grasp the master's secret
for successful mendacity. The vicious circle which Aristotle
adduces is one that IMrs. Radcliffe was over-fond of caricaturing
in the superstitions of her menial characters.®^ In its serious
application lies the secret of the TrpSyrov i/reOSo?, — that first
assumption in fiction from which, once allowed, all other im-
possibilities in the tale flow so naturally as in turn to produce
an illusion of truth in the first falsehood. Twining cites
the observation of Hobbes that "probable fiction is similar
to reasoning rightly from a false principle." The enunciation
of this cardinal principle concerning the nature of fiction and
the use of the wonderful, drawn as it is from psychological
observation and actual practice, runs close to the heart of the
matter.
From the above follows the next technical principle, — a rule
for the guidance of the poet, and the delimitation of the field
87 Ars Foetica, 11. 180-183.
88 "But they do say," cries Annette, "that something has been seen, in
the dead of night, standing beside the great cannon, as if to guard it. ' '
"Well! my good Annette," replies the heroine, "the people who tell
such stories are happy in having you for an auditor, for I perceive you
believe them all."
"Dear ma'amselle! I will show you the very cannon; you can see it
from these windows! "
"Well . . . but that does not prove that an apparition guards it."
"What! not if I show you the very cannon! Dear ma'am, you will
believe nothing." — I'he Mysteries of Udolpho, Chap. XIX.
GBEEK CRITICISM OF FICTION AND MARVEL. 39
of the irrational in tragedy. To the famous epigram irpoac-
peladat re Set ahvvara eiKora fxaXkov t) Svvara cnridava ("the
poet should prefer probable impossibilities to improbable possi-
bilities," as Butcher neatly translates), which Aristotle by
repetition brings into chief importance among his observations
on fiction, no added emphasis is necessary. It is the first and
strongest enunciation of one of the cardinal points in the theory
and practice of fiction. The limitation of the irrational to space
without the plot is another example of Aristotle's differentiation
of the use of the fictitious according to the literary kind involved,
a distinction which many a later critic has unpardonably for-
gotten. It is in itself a further proof of Aristotle's habit of
generalization from empirical observation, and of his avoidance
of vapid and irresponsible theorizing.
The last observation of technique recalls the 'Charis Doc-
trine' of Pindar :^^ the absurdity is so veiled in poetic beauty
that the sense of the former is lost in the appreciation of the
latter. This is the aesthetic point of view par excellence; and
Aristotle comes a step nearer than Pindar to admitting that the
beauty of the thing legitimizes its impossibility. There is here
no solemn warning that "the days that follow are the wisest
witnesses," — only a slight slur in the "we must accept it."
Aristotle, for all his science and experimenting, was a truer lover
of Homer than his more imaginative teacher.
To these criticisms of the wonderful and irrational contained
in the twenty-fourth chapter, one important notice from the
twenty-fifth must now briefly be added. Among the justifica-
tions of fiction, as we saw, was the matter of popular belief and
tradition, the aW ovv (^acn ('thus-men-say') doctrine, as con-
veniently enough it may be called. It was under this justifica-
tion that Aristotle placed the supernatural. "This applies to
tales about the gods. It may well be that these stories are not
higher than fact nor yet true to fact : they are, very possibly,
what Xenophanes says of them. But anyhow, 'this is what
is said,' ""^ If there is a sufficient body of belief for the
matter, let it pass ! This apology for myth, coupled as it is with
8» See above, p. 18.
80 Poetics XXV, 7.— Butcher, p. 101.
40 STUDIES IN THE MAEVELLOUS.
the name of Xenophanes, who carries us back to the old philo-
sophical objection, brightly signalizes at the close of our account
of Aristotle that philosopher's impartiality and penetration, of
which we spoke in the beginning of this section."^ Though in-
clined to approve the anthropomorphic charge of the great
Eleatic, the greater Stagirite is not blind to the propriety of the
god-stories from a literary point of view : in the course of his
masterly, quite empirical, and strictly technical inquiry into
the place of the wonderful in poetry and the proper conditions
of its emplojonent, he has not neglected to put in their proper
position, under the account of fiction, ra irepl dewv^ — the tales
about the gods ! This is perhaps the crowning truth, and most
valuable disillusionment of old preconceptions, contributed by
Aristotle to the new literary criticism of the wonderful begun by
him. From the old philosophical criticism, from the ethical and
educational prepossessions, has growm at last a literary theory,
which properly and inevitably includes a special theory of fiction
and the fabulous, — the two last, however, still somewhat confused
in a multiplicity of terms (^Oavfiaarov^ aXoya^ aSvpara^ airiOava).
The new critical theory was carried forward in most dis-
appointing fashion by the various schools of philosophy and
rhetoric. In nothing is their work more disappointing than in
the matter of fiction. But it is to be remembered that there was
no straw wherewith to make bricks. "The whole of Greek
Poetic," says Professor Saintsbury, "was prejudicially affected
— and the affection has continued to be a source of evil in all
criticism since — by the accidental lateness of prose fiction in
Greek literature.""^ Without a definite body of fiction to
stimulate the theory of fiction it was not to be expected that the
latter would make any great strides. The three centuries between
Aristotle and Dionysius of Halicarnassus are bare enough of
critical texts of any kind, while for our purposes even the
work of the industrious Dionysius offers but a passing in-
terest. In the sixth chapter of the De Thucydide occurs a
notice interesting for its bearing upon the relation of history to
fiction. Between history and poetry there had been, as Pro-
01 See above, pp. 101-102.
02 Hist. Crit. 1, 192.
GBEEK CRITICISM OF FICTION AND MABVEL. 41
fessor Butcher observes, no feud at first, as between poetry and
philosophy.®^ Homer, to the Greeks, was the minute historian of
the Trojan war. The Pre-Socraties have left no hint of a quarrel
in this matter. Even Plato, in a matter of history, is ready to
praise Homer as speaking the words of God and nature.®*
"Aristotle himself speaks of the myths as history; the incidents
they narrate are facts (ra yevofieva); the names of their heroes
are 'historical' [yevofxeva ovofiara) as opposed to fictitious
(Treirot.Tjfieva) names. "®^ Yet he ^vas also able to point out
the difference betwen historical and poetic truth.®" With the rise
of historical prose that distinction naturally grew; it was the
distinction between history and fiction. And now, three hundred
years later, Dionysius cries out fiercely against the admission of
marvellous fictions into serious history. The Halicarnassian says
that Thucydides excels the superior historians in two respects, —
first, in his arrangement of material; "altera," (I give the Latin
translation) "quod fabulosum in suos libros nihil induxit, neque
in eam partem deflexit, ut multitudini fraudem et tanquam
imposturam faceret. quo in genere superiores omnes peccauerant ;
qui Lamias commemorarunt nescio quas in siluis et saltibus, e
terra prodeuntes ; et Nai'das in terra atque aqua pariter degentes
ab inferis profectas, pelago innatantes, semiferas, cum hominibus
coeuntes, et ex mortali diuinoque concubitu semideam sobolem, et
alia quaedam, quae nostra aetas, ut incredibilia planeque delira,
contemnat. "®^ The discussion is carried on in the two following
chapters. In the seventh the author notices how" the false creeps
into history through the successive repetitions of verbal tradi-
tion. The Introduction to the Antiquitates contains other
matter regarding his idea of history. But the above quotation
is sufficient to bring to our attention that other source of hostile
criticism of fiction — the historical conscience — the growth of
which is usually one of the earliest testimonies to the differentia-
tion of a prose fiction from historical narrative.®®
93 Op. cit., p. 401.
oiLaws III, 680-682.
85 Butcher, p. 402 (Poetics IX, 6-7).
90 See above, p. 102.
o"! Dionys. of Hal., ed. I. I. Eeiske, Leipzig 1777, De Thucyd., § VI.
98 Compare, e.cj., the reception of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of
the Britons. See Morlcy's English Writers, 3d. ed.. III. -i'.
42 STUDIES IN THE MAEFELLOUS.
In the first century after Christ, Plutarch and Longinus are
the great names for our purpose. The work De Elocuiione {irepi
ep/xr]V€ia<;) ^ which goes under the name of Demetrius Phalereus,
and may have been of the first century before Christ or the first
century after,®" offers nothing beyond a faint recognition of the
rhetorical use of the wonderfully exaggerated in climax/"" of
the impossible in the field of variety and charm (the Charis
Doctrine^"^), and of the fable when appositely introduced.^"^
Plutarch, more talkative, often wandered toward the strange and
prodigious. Julian^"^ mentions the Mythical Tales of Plutarch,
which are now lost. Evidently the amiable moralist could
inveigh against superstition^"* while penning the romance of
Theseus,^"'* or the frequent asides of the fabulous found in the
Quest ions. '^°^ But his criticism of the use of the wonderful in
literature is found in the famous essay on How a Young Man
Ought to Hear Poems.'^°'^
In this paper, Plutarch, while adopting the old moral view
of the dangers of poetry, and warning youth against the pitfalls
of fiction and fable in the poets, at the same time is more inclined
to speak of dangers than of positive iniquities, and even goes so
far as to elaborate something of a philosophy of fiction. In his
attempt to show how a young person must view and understand
the poets there is almost a defense of the fabulous in literature.
There are, he says, two sources of fiction in poetry: there are
poets who lie willingly, and others who lie unwillingly. "They
do it wnth their wills, because they find strict truth too rigid to
comply with that sweetness and gracefulness of expression, which
most are taken with, so readily as fiction doth." Fiction can
always avoid distasteful truth by substituting pleasing make-
believe; and not even the devices of rhetoric, diction, and the
»8 Demetrius on Style, ed. W. E. Eoberts, Cambridge 1902 ; see pp. 49-64
for discussion of date and authorship.
100 lb., § 52, p. 97.
101 lb., §§ 124-127, pp. 129-131.
102 7b., §§ 1.57, 158, pp. 145-147.
103 Julifin, Ag. the Cynic Heradius, 227A.
10* iforais, Socrates' Daemon, §9.
lOB Lives.
106 E.g., Eoman Questions, Nos. 5, 21.
107 Goodwin 's ed. of the Morals, Boston 1883.
GREEK CRITICISM OF FICTION AND MARVEL. 43
like, can compare with it in giving elegance and grace to a com-
position. "In poems we are more apt to be smitten and fall in
love with a probable fiction than with the greatest accuracy that
can be observed in measures and phrases, where there is nothing
fabulous or fictitious joined with it." To him, as to other Greek
critics, fiction and poetry are almost synonymous terms. "For
though we have known some sacrifices performed without pipes
and dances, yet we own no poetry which is utterly destitute of
fable and fiction.'.' The verses of the philosophers are accounted
speeches which have "borrowed from poetry the chariot of
verse. " In a word, ' * the witchcraft of poetry consists in fiction. ' '
But wherever there occurs anything absurd about the gods or
virtue, the youth who knows this nature of poetry will not have
his belief unduly affected. When he meets with any such mar-
vellous story as that of "Neptune's rending the earth to pieces
and discovering the infernal regions, he will be able to check his
fears of the reality of any such accident.""^
Unwilling fictions, Plutarch would have it, are those which
"express the judgment and belief of poets who thereby discover
and suggest to us the ignorant or mistaken apprehensions they
had of the Deities." Often they put upon these erroneous
beliefs fictitious colors to recommend them to their fellows. But
"almost everyone knows nowadays that the portentous fancies
and contrivances of stories concerning the state of the dead are
accommodated to popular apprehensions, — that the spectres and
phantasms of burning rivers and horrid regions and terrible
tortures expressed by frightful names are all mixed with fable
and fiction, as poison with food. ' ' Here, again, the youth is com-
forted by the knowledge that it is not the nature of poetry to
search out exact truth, and that touching such things as these it
is after all impossible to know anything at all for a certainty. ^°*
It will be noticed that Plutarch is less kindly disposed
toward this second kind of fiction. But in both cases, and this
is the great point to be observed, the author solves the moral
difficulty not by a censorship, such as Plato would have estab-
lished, but by going to poetry itself and discovering there that
108 Op. cit., II, pp. 45-47 (§2).
100/6., pp. 47-49 (§2).
44 STUDIES IN THE MAEVELLOUS.
the nature and purposes of literary truth (though he does not
name the principle as Aristotle did) are different from those of
moral veracity. Here, indeed, is a philosophy of fiction. Proba-
bility, as he observes,"" is the nature of poetic truth ; and to this
remark, which is almost a statement of the psychological basis
of fiction, is added"^ a discussion of the imitative nature of
poetry, from which the nature and usage of fiction are deduced.
The force of imitation, he says, lies in probability; hence poetic
fiction does not, so far as it presents what in view of the facts of
human nature is probable, depart altogether from truth.^^^ As
regards the purpose of poetic truth, there is the clear statement
at the outset that strict truth is ''too rigid to comply with that
sweetness and gracefulness of expression which most are taken
with." For beauty and grace, for the purpose of Pindar's
'Charis,' for variety and multiplicity of contrivance wherewith
"poetry, waiving the truth of things, does most labor to beautify
its fictions,""^ — for these appeals to sense and imagination, does
poetry adorn itself in fiction. "Variety bestows upon fable all
that is pathetical, unusual, and surprising, and thereby makes it
more taking and graceful ; whereas what is void of variety is un-
suitable to the nature of fable, and so raiseth no passions at
all.""* But he has put all this in one most informing phrase —
for our search, a phrase immortal, side by side with Pindar's
Xapt'i — ' * the witchcraft of poetry consists in fiction. ' '
Thus, with a professed disapproval of the allegorical method
of solving the moral problem of fiction, and by confessedly going
to the poets themselves for their own interpretation,"** Plutarch,
though an inveterate moralist, took much the same step as the
scientist Aristotle; and he went even further than the Stagirite
in carefully and explicitly linking the principle of fiction to
that of imitation through probability, and indicating more
110 See above, p. 111.
iii§§3ff.
112 7b., p. 66, § 7.
113 lb., p. 66, § 7.
11* Loc. cit.
115 Ih., § 4. It must be admitted, however, that in this searching of the
poets for their own interpretations he lays himself open in § 4 to the charge
of making "a peck o' thy own words out o' a pint o' the Bible's."
GREEK CRITICISM OF FICTION AND MARVEL. 45
clearly the aesthetic function of variety subserved by the fable.
But he made no advance in the matter of definitely separating
the ordinary fiction of artistic narration from that particular and
stranger aspect of the thing called marvellous. His examples
include what is distinctly wonderful and portentous, as may be
seen from the quotations above ;^^*' they also include, side by side
with these, fictions of the lesser, more ordinary kind. The whole
burden of the discourse, however, points rather toward the
former than the latter, — rather toward the exaggeration that
surprises, than toward the minor verisimilitude, the complete
illusion of which leaves us undisturbed.
The De Siihlimitate^'^'' offers two testimonies toward the
criticism of the marvellous. First, it carries on the discussion,
already observed in Demetrius,^^^ of the use of wonderful ex-
aggeration to heighten the effect of sublimity and climax.
Examples of such sublimity are quoted from Homer; their
effect is said to be overpowering. Yet, in the next breath, the
old moral view stalks across the stage. "But although all these
things are awe-inspiring, yet from another point of view, if they
be not taken allegorically, they are altogether impious, and
violate our sense of w^hat is fitting. ' '^^^ In spite of this umbrati-
cality, however, the author has the penetration to point out that
in the case of marvels the poet must be granted greater license
than the orator. In recommending the use of images to gain
sublimity, it is held that the image [^avraa-ia) has one purpose
with the orators (that of vivid description, ivdpyua) , another
with the poets (that of enthrallment, eWXT^fi?).'^" The poets
have a tendency to fabulous exaggeration, and they transcend
the credible at all points. In oratory the image should always
have reality and truth. ^^^
This distinction between poetical and oratorical imagery,
with its allowance to the former of something of marvellous
116 See above, p. 111.
117 Ed., W. E. Roberts, Cambridge 1899. For date, see p. 16; author-
ship, pp. 1 ff.
118 See above, p. 110.
119 Op. cit., § IX, 6, 7.
120 Ih., § XV, 2.
121 lb., §XV, 7, 8.
46 STUDIES IN TEE MARVELLOUS.
exaggeration, though given with an air of some doubt, as Pro-
fessor Saintsbury remarks,'-- is nevertheless a valuable contribu-
tion to the theory of the wonderful. It is also to be noted that this
is a distinction based on empirical evidence, — not upon philo-
sophical generalization.
The second testimony of the De Suhlimitate is contained in
the famous comparison of the Iliad and the Odyssey.'-^ This is
the general proposition : the use of marvellous tales in literature
is the sign of a declining genius. The Odyssey suggests this
observation. The special token of Homer's old age and declin-
ing powers is held to be a love of marvellous tales {tcx^lKoixvOov).
"You seem to see [in the Odyssey] the ebb and flow of greatness,
and a fancy roving in the fabulous and incredible, as though the
ocean were withdrawing into itself and was being laid bare
within its own confines. (14) In saying this I have not forgotten
the tempests in the Odyssey and the story of the Cyclops and the
like. If I speak of old age, it is nevertheless the old age of
Homer. The fabulous element (to /xvOlkov) , however, prevails
throughout this poem over the real. The object of this digres-
sion has been, as I said, to show how easily great natures in
their decline are sometimes diverted into absurdity, as in the
incident of the wine-skin and of the men who were fed like swine
by Circe . . . , and of Zeus like a nestling nurtured by the
doves, and of the hero who was without food for ten days upon
the wreck, and of the incredible tale of the slaying of the suitors.
For what else can we term these things than veritable dreams of
Zeus?"'^* Here, indeed, our wonder is that the hardships of the
hero and the slaying of the suitors should be thought absurd.
We, few of us, are yet so sophisticated as to perceive absurdity
behind these marvels. The author's condemnation is, of a truth,
sweeping enough. Childishness! That is the judgment offered
by the reputed Longinus when the question is one of the employ-
ment of marvels in literature. We shall find the criticism
repeated seventeen hundred years later.
i^^Hist. Crit., I, 166.
123 Op. cit., § IX, 11-15.
124 Tr. Roberts, pp. 66-69.
GEEEK CRITICISM OF FICTION AND MARVEL. 47
The remaining notices of Greek criticism of the marvellous
are of little importance, and should be discussed briefly. The two
great names after Aristotle — Plutarch and Longinus — are suc-
ceeded by a roster to which belong hardly any other than the
names of minor show-rhetoricians, from Dion Chrysostom of
Plutarch's own century, to Julian in the fourth; under Byzantine
criticism Professor Saintsbury in his History of Criticism men-
tions only three Greek names, — Photius of the ninth, Tzetzes of
the twelfth, and John of Sicily of the thirteenth century. Several
of the recurrent subjects upon which these critics exercised their
ingenuities, and which touch the subject of the marvellous more
or less indirectly, may be mentioned. Of direct contribution to
the subject there is practically nothing.
The old quarrel between Plato and the Poets is not lost to
sight. Maximus Tyrius^^^ discusses "Whether Plato was right
in banishing Homer from his Republic?", and endeavors to
harmonize poetry and philosophy. Sextus Empiricus, the phil-
osopher, maintains that the sayings of the poets are harmful,
useless, or of but little use.^^e
The interpretation of myth and mythic elements by rational-
ization and allegory continues. Dion Chrysostom accounts for
the artists' representation of the sun and moon in human form
by attributing to those bodies an intelligence which the artist can
adequately represent only by foregoing realistic fiifir]aL<; and
symbolizing them, instead, in human form. This symbolism, he
says, is far above that of the crude barbarians who see the gods
in the form of animals.^" Maximus Tyrius recommends the
allegorical interpretation of the poets. In the matter of the
fictitious nature of poetry the same writer says that poetry is
"based on fictions as to its arguments. "^-^
Philostratus cannot away with Homer's airCOava. He remarks
that for heroes to be 8€/ca7r7;;^€i? is pleasant enough in mythology,
125 Ed., Reiske, 2 vols., Leipzig 1774. I have not been able to gain
access to the books, and have relied on Professor Saintsbury 's informa-
tion {Eist. Crit. I, 117).
120 Ed., Fabricius, Leipzig 1840, Vol. II, pp. 114, 115 (Adversu^ Gram-
maticos, Lib. I, Cap. XIII, §§292-296).
^^'' Dion Chrysostom, ed., J. De Arnim, Berlin 1893, Disc, xii (' OXvairinds) ,
§§56ff. (Vol. I, 171ff.).
i28ifisf. Crit, I, 117.
48 STUDIES IN THE MABFELLOUS.
but as a matter of fact unbelievable. This hint of two possible
points of view is followed by a long jeu d' esprit on the evidences
of giants, — an excuse for a collection of marvellous tales.^^*
Sextus Empiricus flatly declares that poetry is absolutely useless
so long as it deals in feWi? tcrTO/aiat?.""
But the mass of discussion among these rhetoricians, so far as
the wonderful is concerned, is taken up with the discussion of the
orator's use of the fable (^fivdo<i). All the Progymnasmata
('Composition-Books,' as Professor Saintsbury calls them^^^
discuss the proper use of the Aesop-like fable for rhetorical
illustration and variety; and the discussions become as tiresome
and useless for our purposes, as do the other divigations of the
rhetoricians for the student of general literary criticism. This
minor type of the fable, a rhetorical type of fiction, and, in one
sense, of the marvellous, was already centuries old. Aristotle
discusses fables as a division of proof by examples, and cites as
illustrations Stesichorus on Phalaris, and Aesop at Samos. He
remarks that fables are suited to popular oratory, — an echo of the
disesteem in which the wonder-tales were held by the cultured."*
Demetrius, as we have already observed, recommended the
piquant use of fables.
Turning to Walz'^^ we find the rhetoricians differentiating
fivdo'i and Scqyrjfia. MvOo'i for the orator is a short story, false
(^|revB^<i) , but probable (Tri'^ai/o?). !!&)<? B'av <y4vono Tridavof;
*'Av ra TrpoaijKovra Trpdy/xaTa rot? TrpoacoTroi'i airoSiBco/jLev
(Hermogenes, Cap. I). The hi-qyrifxa^ on the other hand, must
be eKdeaiv irpdyfiaTO'i <y€yov6TO<; ^ ?) o)? yeyovorof (Hermog.
Cap. 2). The fable is used by the orator to illustrate and drive
home his point, but o ixvdo<; nroiriTOiv fxkv TrporfKde (Apthonius I) ;
and was used by the ancients, as e.g., by Hesiod rov Trj<; aT]86vo<;
eliroiv {Epy. 201) -(Hermog. I and Theon. HI) . Thus, a relation
is suggested between the fable of the orator and the allegorical
use of myths by the poets. The iJLv0o<i is called Sybaritican,
i'^^ Fhilostratus, ed., Kayser (Teubner). Heroic Dialogue, §§ 667, 668.
130 Op. cit., loc. cit., § 278.
131 m.st. Crit., I, 96.
132 Aristotle, Rhetoric II, 20 (tr., Well. Ion, p. 182).
lasWalz, Ehetores Graeci, Stuttgart, etc. 1832.
GREEK CEITICISM OF FICTION AND MARVEL. 49
Cilician, or Cj'prian, according to its origin; but to Aesop most
are attributed (Hermog. I). It is of three kinds and uses:
TO fiGv iari Xo'ytKov^ to Be tjOikov^ to 8e /j-lktov (Apthonius I).
Examples for the orator's use are conveniently appended.
All this is at any rate an acknowledgment, a recommendation,
of a literary, distinctly rhetorical (in the ancient sense of the
term) use of fiction, and, by the way, of the marvellous. The
fables given as examples contain elements of wonder. Here was
the evolution, at an early time and long continuing, of a distinct
and technical type of marvellous narrative; and, what is most
noteworthy, it was a development within prose composition, — a
sort of incidental, illustrative use of prose fiction. With it there
went a critical theory, — something that did not accompany the
geographical romances of Plato, Euhemerus, and Diodorus,^^* or
the fictions of Philostratus.^^^
Julian (c. 331-363 A.D.) undertakes, in the oration against
the Cynic Heraclius,^^" to trace the genealogy of the fables, but
supposes that they, like the other kinds of art, were invented by
the people among whom they are found ( § 2 ) . These fables
were adapted to the child-like intelligence of earlier generations ;
but the poets added the apologue (6 alvo<;) , which differs from the
fable in that while the latter is addressed to children, the former
is intended for men, — for their enlightenment as well as for their
pleasure ( § 3 ) . The Oration continues, in a fashion equally un-
profitable for us, with a discussion of the place of m^i;hography
with reference to morality and theology, the kinds of mystery-
fables and their comparison, the pedagogy of Plutarch in the
matter, and concludes (§§ 17 ff.) with an example of the fable.
The whole discussion is religious rather than literary, and is all
under the neo-platonic view. It serves as a type of the rhetorical
and mystical discussion of fable, but contributes nothing to the
theory of fiction or wonder.
Of the three Byzantines noted by Professor Saintsburj-, the
testimonies are equally without value. The Bibliotheca of
134 See Chassang, Histeire du Roman, Part 2, Ch. IV.
135 See Chassang, Appollonius de Tyane, Paris 1862.
^SG Emperetir Julien, (Euvres Coinplclcs, tr., E. Talbot, Paris 1863. Text
ed., Hertlein (Teubner).
50 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS.
Photius^^^ includes notices of quite a number of works of fiction,
or collections of wonderful tales, but the comment upon them is
without significance."* Tzetzes and John of Sicily offer nothing.
The gist of Greek criticism of fiction and the marvellous
has now been presented : the present chapter may be brought to
its conclusion by a brief summary of the more general results of
the inquiry. The mere mentioning of the following points will be
enough to indicate their derivation from the facts already pre-
sented, and their bearing upon the problem of the marvellous.
(1) Greek criticism of the marvellous is for the most part an
undifferentiated element in Greek criticism of the fictitious in
the poets. In most of this criticism there seems to be little or no
change of emphasis when the illustrations pass from the minor
aspects of fiction to the decidedly marvellous. Both are criticized
in like fashion in the same breath. In some cases, however,
notably in Aristotle and Plutarch, the primary reference seems
to be to the distinctly prodigious.
(2) Greek criticism of the fictitious arises through a criticism
of Greek mythology. This myth-criticism begins with a moral
expostulation with the impieties and improprieties of many of the
marvellous details of the god-stories, extends to a moral attack
upon the fiction of mythology and of the poets in general, and is
given something of an economic aspect by Plato, who is also the
chief supporter of its ethical character. This criticism is de-
livered by the philosophers, historians, and, in less degree, by
some of the poets themselves.
(3) Various solutions are offered of the difficulties and per-
isT Photius, Migne, Patrologia Graeca, Vols. 3, 4 (103, 104).
138 Vol. 3, Col. 414, 475. Photius attributes a certain school of fiction
(lamblichus, Achilles Tatius, Heliodorus, and Damascius) to Lucian and
Lucius. In Col. 478 is his opinion of the school. His notice (Col. 413)
of AAMA2KI0T HEPI RAPAAOSfiN AOFOI (consisting of four books, one
each on the following subjects, — of incredible fictions, of incredible stories
aV;out demons, of incredible tales of souls apjicaring after death, of in-
credible things of nature) introduces to our notice a work which had many
companions in antiquity. Several of these, collections of marvellous
anecdotes, have been edited by A. Westermann, raradoxographoi, Bruns-
wick 1839. The most famous of them all is Pseudo-Aristotelian IIEPI
GATMASinX AKOTZMATON, ed. Beckmann, Cottingcn 1786. Cf. with
these the M ythoc/raphoi Graeci, ed. Westerman, Brunswick 1843.
GBEEK CRITICISM OF FICTION AND MARVEL. 51
plexities raised by the impious and fictitious (marvellous) ele-
ments in mythology. Eationalization, allegory, euhemerism, are
broached; they are all philosophical and do not recognize the
problem in any other light than that of philosophy and religion.
(4) Inasmuch as the moral criticism and the philosophical
solutions are necessarily based upon Homer and Hesiod, these
poets themselves, and, by analogy, all poets, are censured and
censored. Thus, a criticism of poetry, that is to say, literary
criticism itself, begins to develop out of the ethical criticism of
marvel and fiction. But so long as the ethical preoccupation
continues literary criticism does not realize its own separate ends.
(5) At last, with Aristotle, a real literary criticism develops,
which is divorced from moral philosophy. This new criticism, in
turn, attacks the problem of fiction, and especially the marvellous
in fiction, as a purely literary problem. An aesthetic has suc-
ceeded the ethical outlook. Thus is developed the theory of poetic
truth, under which the marvellous assumes its proper place.
(6) The successors of Aristotle mix the real literary criticism
he established with the older moral expostulation and interpreta-
tion. Plutarch is the most important name after Aristotle.
(7) Throughout the course of critical commentary run cer-
tain minor doctrines, as they have been called, w^hich gather
force by repetition. Such are the * Charis-doctrine ' (Pindar,
Aristotle, Demetrius {De Elocutio), Plutarch, etc.) ; and the
doctrine of sublimity and climax, closely related to, if not
identical with, the 'Charis-doctrine' (Demetrius, Longinus).
Both these doctrines, by justifying the use of the marvellous for
the literary purposes of beauty and force, contribute to the
aesthetic liberation of the wonderful.
(8) Finally, it may be remarked that these facts concerning
the development of a literary criticism of the marvellous, illus-
trate at the same time a stage in the history of the marvellous.
To describe that stage would be to repeat the details of the
rise of that new Greek consciousness by which the marvels of a
believed religion passed through the transitional epoch of ethical
distrust and criticism, to the condition of accepted aesthetic
illusion. Literature then inherited the marvellous a second time,
— not, as at first, from religious faith, but from an aesthetic
reconciliation of fact and fiction.
52 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS.
CHAPTER II.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WONDER.
Inadequacy of previous descriptions of wonder — States
allied to wonder: (1) surprise, astonishment, and curiosity;
(a) surprise differentiated logically, as in sudden and unusual
experiences; (b) surprise differentiated physiologically, as in
short and long "circuits"; (c) passing of surprise [through
astonishment, at times] to curiosity and wonder; (d) relations
of curiosity, explanation, and wonder; (e) six typical cases;
(f) differentiation of the improbable and the impossible, and
their relations to wonder and marvel and to the six typical cases;
(g) the marvellous: (2) belief and wonder; (a) definition;
(ft) degree of belief consonant with wonder; (c) the ridicu-
lous; (d) belief and the standard of ideal possibility: (3)
imagination and the marvellous: (4) fear and marvel: (5)
pleasure and marvel. — Summary.
In spite of the large part that wonder has played in the
history of ideas, especially in the realm of religious thought
and belief, and although its genetic relation to reflection and
philosophy was a truism in the days of Plato^ and Aristotle,^
its serious investigation has hardly reached beyond the descrip-
tive stage in which Descartes left it in his Traite des Passions.^
Bain is only a little fuller in his description than Descartes.
"Surprise and wonder," he says, "are due to the clash of op-
posing states; the intrusion of something extraordinary or un-
familiar, through which is incurred a shock that may be con-
1 Plato, Theaetctus, § 155. — ' ' For wonder is the feeling of a philos-
opher, and philosophy begins in wonder. ' '
2 Aristotle, Metaphysics, I, 2, 9 (Bekker).
3 Art. LIII, L 'admiration: — Lorsque la premiere rencontre do quelque
objet nous surprend, et que nous le jugcons etre nouveau, ou fort different
de ce que nous connaissions aujjaravant, ou bion de ce que nous siipposions
qu'il devait etre, cela fait quo nous I'admirons ot on soinnios otones; ot
pour ce que cela pout arriver avant que nous connaissions aucuncment si
cot objet nous est convenable ou s'il ne 1 'est pas, il me somhlc quo 1 'ad-
miration est la premiere de toutes les passions: et ello n 'a point de con-
trairo, k cause quo si 1 'objet que so presonte n'a rien on aoi qui nous sur-
prcnne, nous n 'en sommes aucunemont emus, ot nous le consid^rons sans
passion.
TRE PSYCHOLOGY OF WONDEE. 53
sidered as something beyond mere sensation."* It is perhaps
somewhat unfortunate that the intrusion of the unfamiliar
object should be regarded as a state of mind in conflict with
another pre-existing state; for one must ask where the strange
state originated, whence it gathered its support and "fringe,"
and if, when once constituted, it is not by itself the wonder
or surprise. Moreover, why the extraordinary or unfamiliar
image should be felt as an intrusion, and how it is so felt, are
questions nicely glossed, or at any rate rendered all the more
tantalizing by the vague phrase, "through which is incurred a
shock that may be considered as something beyond mere sensa-
tion. " A little further on Bain recurs to the subject in con-
nection with his definition of novelty. Novelty he explains as
the superior force of stimuli at their first application.^ On
the other hand, wonder, he avers, is founded on relativity, and
involves more than simple novelty. While surprise is one degree
beyond novelty as being a shock which is not only novel but
also unexpected, involving contradiction and conflict, wonder,
on the other hand, contains surprise with the new effect of con-
templating something that rises above human experience and
that elevates us to a feeling of superiority. Often, though, the
object of contemplation may be something that falls decidedly
beneath the ordinary.® — But we may easily question these dicta
on novelty and surprise; and the relation between surprise and
wonder seems too glibly stated.
The newer psychology, with its less essay-like character, is
almost equally vague upon the subject of wonder. The simple
character and early appearance of the emotion, hinted at by
Descartes, are insisted upon by Wundt^ and by Preyer.^ Sully
writes: "The intense craving for the wonderful, the love of
the marvellous, has something of an intoxicating effect, and
paralyzes the impulses of inquiry. But in its moderate degrees
the emotion of wonder is the natural stimulus to further in-
quiry. Wonder lives by isolating the new fact or circumstance
* Bain, TJie Emotions and the Will, London 1875, p. 69.
5 Op. cit., p. 83.
6 7d., p. 85.
7 Physiol. Psychol, II, 18, 332.
8 Die Seele des Eindes, Leipzig 1890, pp. 108, 134.
54 STUDIES IN THE MABFELLOUS.
from the familiar order of experience."^ "Wonder, he further
remarks, is a more complex affair than surprise, and implies
comparison and recognition of contrast. "What is wholly new
or unexpected always surprises us, but does not necessarily
excite wonder. "^° The notice continues with a few words upon
the pleasurable aspect of w'onder and also upon its relation to
fear and admiration. In conclusion, its complex nature in ref-
erence to intellectual emotion is set forth: it involves fixing of
attention at the stage of surprise, discrimination further on,
may interfere with inquiry, but often is the starting point for
discovery. As cap-stone to such a general and unsatisfactory
account. Professor Dewey's statement may well be quoted here.
"It may come about that we grow so used to our customary
environment that we feel wonder only when the shock of sur-
prise strikes us, but the normal healthy attitude of the mind
is wonder at all facts, familiar or novel, until it has mastered
their meaning and made itself at home among them.""
Professor James' notice is equally vague, and even more
meagre, though it does suggest, as another line of inquiry, the
instinctive sensory susceptibility of animals to novel stimuli.
"Already pretty low down among vertebrates," he says, "we
find that any object may excite attention provided it be only
novel, and that attention may be followed by approach and
exploration by nostril, lips, or touch." (Intervene some remarks
upon curiosity and fear as antagonistic principles in such ex-
ploration.) "Some such susceptibility for being excited and
irritated by the mere novelty, as such, of any movable feature
of the environment must form the instinctive basis of all human
curiosity, though, of course, the superstructure absorbs contri-
butions from so many other factors of the emotional life that
the original root may be hard to find. With what is called
scientific curiosity, and with metaphysical wonder, the practical
instinctive root has probably nothing to do. The stimuli here are
not objects, but ways of conceiving objects; and the emotions
and actions they give rise to are to be classed, with many other
Sully, Outlines of Psychology, London 1885, pp. .'522, 523. Tlie italics
are mine. See below, p. 65.
10 Loc. cit.
"J. Dewey, Psychology, 3d. ed., N. Y. 1899, p. 304.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WONDEE. 55
Eesthetic manifestations, sensitive and motor, as incidental fea-
tures of our mental life. ' '^- To this valuable suggestion — ' ' ways
of conceiving objects" — we shall recur below.^^
Ribot's^* contribution to the subject is as suggestive as any
and as sketchy as all. He starts with an "instinct, a tendency,
a craving" — the "primitive craving for knowledge" (conserved
by selection in the struggle for existence) — and finds its first
stage of development to be surprise. Surprise is "a special
emotional state which cannot be traced back to any other, consist-
ing of a shock, a disadaptation, * * * without contents, with-
out object, save a relation." From this first stage he differen-
tiates wonder as a second. Surprise, he says, is momentary, a
disadaptation, and is without objective material. Wonder, on
the other hand, is stable, a readaptation, and possesses as its
material some strange or unaccustomed object. It is the awak-
ening of attention. The third stage is the interrogation, "What
is it? What is the use of it?", and consists in mental assimila-
tion. Finally, thinks Ribot, the transition to the disinterested,
non-utilitarian period is "through the natural, innate inclina-
tion of the human intellect towards the extraordinary, the
strange, the marvellous. "'^^
In this account there is, to be sure, a suggestive analysis of
the relations of surprise, wonder, and curiosity; and the term
disadaptation, in spite of its linguistic aw^kwardness, is as con-
venient as it is illuminating. Wonder, however, and the won-
derful, seem mixed in the suggestion of an instinct toward the
marvellous; the subjective nature of wonder is confused with
its objective reference.^^ Moreover, the psychological genealogy
of the marvellous is not given. He does not say that the descent
is from innate curiosity through surprise, wonder, and inter-
rogation; but simply adds a fourth stage of disinterested curi-
osity by postulating another innate, unnamed mental tendency
toward the "extraordinary, the strange, the marvellous."
Surely, this is a loose statement. It may be that the author's
I'W. James, Psychology, II, 429.
13 See below, e.cj., p. 66.
14 Eibot, Psychology of the Emotions, Lomlon 1897, pp. 36S-371.
15 Italics are mine.
10 See below, p. 69,
56 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS.
idea is that the love of the marvellous is disinterested curiosity :
but even so he is forced to hedge on the word "disinterested";^'
and so we are no nearer a clear view of the matter. Even
impersonal interest is a questionable phrase when applied to
the interest in the marvellous; for the old utilitarian, struggle-
for-existence curiosity must in its investigations often have been
as unconscious of self-accruing gains as is the curiosity of a
modern chance visitor in mediumistic circles. Curiosity, indeed,
is as often the vice of the idle as the virtue of the active, — a
truism with us no more than with our proto-savages, — a fact with
human beings no more than w^itli other animals. Finally, in
postulating this instinct toward the marvellous, Ribot gives us
no hint as to its nature, — whether, e.g., it be simple or complex.
What, may be asked at once, is its relation to the impulse to
exaggerate, or to the phenomena of belief or awe?^*
The rather astonishing failure of the professed psychologists
to explicate the important subject of wonder leaves the field
open to original remark; and, in view of the present need of a
clear and systematic view of the wonder state, it may not be
presumptuous for a layman to hazard a few observations on
his own responsibility.
That wonder, like joy and hope, care and anger, is not the
name of a single process, but rather of a class, "in which a
large number of single affective processes are grouped because
of certain common characteristics,"^^ is a statement that invites
conviction. Indeed, the complexity of the psychical processes
in this case is undoubtedly the very fact that has daunted in-
vestigators; but the common experience of the state, its tremen-
dous importance in the history of ideas and institutions, espe-
cially in those of a religious and literary nature, together with
its affiliations with certain of the simplest and most ancient of
human psychoses, might easily convert the timidity of empir-
ical observation to the enthusiasm of a real hope of beginning
the eclaircissement of a field of human phenomena that are as
IT Op. cit., p. 371.
18 For other mention of wonder see: A. T. Ormond, Dictionary of
Phi1o.<!ophy and Psychology, II, 820-21 (a definition concerned mostly with
the religious aspect of wonder) ; G. T. Ladd, Psycholoqy, 1894, pp. 540-
541; G. Spiller, The Mind of Man, London 1902, p. 270.
le Wundt, Outlines of Psychology, Eng. tr., Leipzig 1902, § 13.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WON DEE. 57
intense in interest as they have been important in development.
The best approach to the matter will lie through an examina-
tion in detail of certain states closely allied to wonder; and
through a decision, in the case of each such state, as to the
nature of the alliance. For, on the one hand, any attempt more
precise than this to draw up a typical state of wonder must be
doomed to failure because of the uniqueness, in variation, of
all particular states of wonder; while, on the other hand, the
proposed approach will, by its many-sidedness and frequent
perspective, naturally afford a series of checks and counter-
checks for determining the presence or absence of wonder states.
By contemplating the relations to wonder of surprise, curiosity,
belief, imagination, fear, and pleasure, there may be gained
from a purely descriptive beginning a suggestion for the analysis
of complex wonder states into their elements, and also a hint
of the physiological processes or conditions upon which their
prevalence depends.
Long ago Descartes indicated the primitive and elemental
character of surprise by placing it first in the order of the
"Passions, "-° though he confused surprise and wonder in the
usual fashion. The presence of the state in animals, where it
appears with all the air of simple and immediate motor reac-
tion, at once establishes its nature as being far from complex.-^
What more simple, more immediate, than tlie startled movement
of wild creatures, say a herd of deer, when surprised in their
native haunts? Hit a drowsy dog with a well-aimed stone;
the jump of surprise appears quite involuntary, almost a pure
reflex. There are scarcely any other feelings, except the gen-
eral ones of physiological pleasure and pain, that have to the
same extent immediateness of response for their central char-
acter, and completeness of motor activity for their peripheral
expression. So strong indeed is the latter characteristic that it
persists even into those cases where the surprise has become
chiefly significant as a distinctively mental phenomenon. The
somatic reverberation of the Eureka of the staid scientist is a
matter of humorous comment!
20 See above, p. 120, note 3.
21 Cf. Eibot, as cited above, p. 123, note 14.
58 STUDIES IN THE MAEVELLOUS.
But what is this thing called surprise? How is it called
forth ? It may be said to follow from the interruption of a phys-
ical or mental state, or both, by the sudden or by the unusual.
If a loud explosion should break in upon me as I am writing
these words, or if some one should noiselessly steal up. behind
me and close his hands over my eyes, the suddenness of either
experience would engender a state of surprise. On the other
hand, the German servant-girl would fall into a similar state
if the Czar of all the Russias were to announce to her by crier,
with due regard to mitigating the sudden nature of the news,
the unusual circumstance that he was about to interrupt her
ordinary duties with a morning visit. The novelty of such an
intention would occasion a surprise only second to that which
one might experience upon being set down in the land of Brob-
dignag. Or, to take an example that will combine both the
sudden and the unusual, as in the majority of cases they are
combined, who can look out now from the modern tavern-porch
at the Grand Canon of the Colorado without picturing the thrill-
ing surprise of Cardenas and his Spaniards when, as they
advanced slowly over the mesas, suddenly, without the slightest
hint of warning, they stood upon the brink of that endless, cas-
tellated chasm, doubly unusual, supremely unique, to the won-
dering eyes of those old conquistadores who for weeks had seen
nothing but endless plain and mesa. In a word, it is the un-
looked for, the unexpected, whether because of its suddenness
or its unusualness, that, breaking in upon a state of conscious-
ness not in train for its adaptation, occasions surprise. To use
Ribot's ugly but convenient word, it is the disadaptation re-
sulting from the unexpected that produces the feeling under
consideration.
But there is more to observe upon a closer view. In the
first class of the examples just given — i.e., in the class that may
be termed the "sudden" — the explosion, or the merry joker,
afford stimuli that are simple, direct, and physical; and the
surprise is easily described as the involuntary response to the
physical shock. For such a reflex there needs no play of any
save the lower of the central nervous ganglia. But in the second
class of examples — the unusual — though there is still a physical
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WONDER. 59
character to the stimulus, it is no longer a matter of simple
and direct shock obtaining an immediate reflex from the lower
centers. If the Governor of the State should visit me this morn-
ing, the mere sudden appearing of the man — that, is the mere
sudden view of him physically — would be the least of the sur-
prise, would quite possibly enter into it not at all; but the
mental recognition of the new relation so established, of the
unusualness of such a visit, would give almost the entire content
of the surprise. This reflection upon a relation involves a
course far other than the simple, direct course of the surprise
occasioned by the explosion: the center now concerned is the
chief ganglionic center of all, the cortex itself.-" The action
here is over an indirect and long circuit; and is exceedingly
complex as compared with the short circuit of the explosion
experience which, instead of rising to the hemispheres, passes
from the sense-organ to some lower nerve-center and out to the
muscles. The two processes are represented by Professor James'
diagram of the two types of reaction."
We have thus two general cases of surprise, differentiated
by both logical and physiological means : the sudden type, in-
volving the short circuit of reaction; and the unusual type, in-
volving the long circuit of reaction and the cognition of novelty.
It might be convenient to call the former 'physical surprise,'
and the latter 'mental surprise.' Moreover, it may be noticed
in passing, that mental surprise, as involving a concept, affords
material for a wider expression, literary or otherwise, than
the mere motor response or inarticulate cry of physical surprise.
A step further. In either case the shock is often so great
as to produce an intense duration of surprise, or, stating it in
terms of the organism, a state approximating temporary nerv-
ous paralysis. This may take place with, or without, the added
ingredient of fear; and is generally denoted by the stronger
term, astonishment: "struck dumb with astonishment" is the
common phrase.-* This must not, however, be confused with
22 Cf. Sully, as quoted above, p. 54.
23 W. James, Psychology, Briefer Course, p. 98.
24 It might be well to insist here upon a differentiation of terms. ' Aston-
ishment' might be limited to the nervous effects of this paralysis, — 'amaze-
ment' to its mental effects.
60 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS.
wonder. Often it may be hard for the individual to differen-
tiate the two, — to say when he passes from astonishment to
wonder; yet the condition implied in the former is anything
but wonder. It involves a complete cessation of all activity, a
blankness of mind, and a statue-like rigidity of body, which pre-
clude per sc all possibility of any activity. On the other hand,
wonder, though it lacks the vi\'id acti\'ity of definite reasoning,
is by no means a complete cessation of mental activity. Un-
certainty, not the paralysis of amazement, characterizes wonder.
Johnson was not at pains to distinguish the two when in the
Barribler-^ he described wonder as "a pause of reason, a sudden
cessation of the mental progress"; and, again, as the "gloomy
quiescence of astonishment."
But the state of surprise, whether it passes into astonishment
or not. is in either case too spasmodic to keep its character long.
Activity and change are as characteristic of surprise as is im-
mediateness of effect. The duration of any one state is limited.
What state or states may succeed?
Consider first the sudden, or physical, case of surprise. If,
after the shock, weak or severe, the mind is brought into opera-
tion, the surprise or astonishment passes somewhat insensibly,
that is gradually, into a new state. Without such succession
of mental activity the shock would entirely pass off in motor
discharge, — die away in diminuendo of physical reverberation
like the lessening waves of a tone vibration; with such activity
of the mind, there supervenes upon the involuntary attention
won by the shock a new state, the insignia of which are a tend-
ency toward voluntary attention and the framing of the ques-
tion, "What was it?" Where before the whole process was
one of mere neural activity, of what has been called the short
circuit, the new state means the establishment of the longer loop.
The mind is endeavoring to assimilate the physical experience
to its fund of similar experiences, — to relate it, to make adapta-
tion succeed disadaptation.
Of two sorts, however, may be this attempt at adaptation.
The mind may be ready with some answer or hypothesis whereby
the explosion, to keep the former example, may be accounted
^^Eamblcr, July 9, 1751.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WONDER. 61
for. The powder works have blown up again! Or cannon
are saluting some officer of state! Perhaps it is the blasting
for the new tunnel ! The marshalling of these and similar rea°-
sons, the weighing of them in evidence, the passing from one
to another and back again in search of the real cause, supple-
menting them by further inquiries, by telephoning and con-
sulting newspapers,— all this is patently what is known as curi-
osity. But if, on the other hand, the mind is ready with no
answer or hypothesis ; or if, instead of definite hypotheses, only
the vaguest of dim hints of possible causes flit ghost-like
across the mind, and disappear irrevocably into dimmer shad-
ows; or, finally, if the mind lacks sufficient evidence for deter-
mining which of its hypotheses is correct, and so remains
puzzled and at a comparative standstill,— the condition is one
of wonder: wonder as to what is the cause, or as to which of
several probable causes is the real one. Similarly, in the ex-
ample of the eyes being suddenly covered by the hands of one
stealing up behind, whenever there is, or so long as there is,
a possibility of discovering who the wag was, the curiosity of
the victim is uppermost. But if, conceivably, there should
occur no name of a probable perpetrator, or if one be at his
wit's end to choose amongst many possible names, a state of
wonder may be supposed to supervene. Moreover, it should be
noted that in either case — though we cannot say in any case
of wonder— yet in either of these cases, or in cases similarly
constituted of sudden shock,— let the solution be once given,
the wonder disappears immediately. It was another powder
mill smashed up! Good, nothing strange there! Or it was
blasting in the hills ! Ah, so ! And the wonder dwindles away.
The only possible exception to this rule would be such as would
cause immediately another condition of surprise, and that a
condition of the second or "unusual" class. If, for instance,
the reply were, ''It was the falling over of Ut. So-and-so into
the bay," a new and greater state of surprise, consequent upon
the nnusnalnoss of such a proceeding, would succeed the former.
Three cases, or degrees, of the unusual may be observed:
first, what I shall call 'mere rarity'; second, improbability; third,
impossibility.
The unusual that is merely rare, and the unusual that is so
62 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS.
unusual, to speak colloquially, as to be improbable, are easily
euough differentiated in concept. Particular examples are
often apt to shade both ways. The visit of the Czar to Gretchen,
for instance, might, with a slight stretch of judgment, be taken
as an example of either case. But finding a land of giants is
so much more improbable than the Czar's visit to Gretchen that
beside it the visit seems only a case of rarity. For the purpose
of the argument, it may be assumed that the Gretchen incident
is an example of mere rarity. A captious reader may, in what
follows, substitute for Gretchen the winning of a prize in the
lottery, or, perhaps, the discovery of an honest alderman!
Suppose, then, that of a fine Sunday morning Gretchen is
employing her motor activities in the ancient and honorable
vocation of sweeping and dusting! The chances are, of course,
ten to one that her surprise upon opening the door and hearing
of the intended visit of the Russian autocrat w^ll durate to a
prolonged paralysis of the ordinary functioning of politeness.
Even the actual appearance of the Emperor himself will hardly
avail to break that spell of Teutonic immobility. But Gretchen
is more than astonished: she is amazed. The unusualness of
the visit has been recognized mentally, and the mental surprise
has been so great as temporarily to arrest the comparing and
assimilating functions of her mind. The states of wonder and
curiosity will follow, as in the previous case of physical sur-
prise, with this difference, — that, whereas in the former case
the supervention of curiosity and wonder involved a switching
on of the longer loop of reaction, here, on the other hand, the
activity of mental surprise has already established that circuit.
The indices of the succeeding states are still the same, — vol-
untary attention, in place of involuntary attention, and inter-
rogation. As long as there is a hope of successfully answering
the question, the state of curiosity may be said to endure; with
bafflement, to coin a convenient word, wonder succeeds. It is
not hard to picture Gretchen 's excited review of possible causes
for such an unheard-of visit, or her curious listening at key-
holes and badgering of her betters, until, forcibly repressed,
her sources of information shut off and her hypotheses wildly
vertiginous, she relapses into either a second amazement or the
gentler state of helpless wonder!
THE PSYCROLOGY OF WONDEB. 63
The inter-relations of the characteristic of mere rarity
(which by a familiar trick of the mind attaches itself to the
objective stimulus^"), of the presence or absence in the mind
of explanatory hypotheses, and of wonder, are somewhat com-
plex. But the multitude of particular examples may be reduced,
I think, to six t}T)ical cases.
1. Where a seeming rarity ceases with the giving of the
explanation. — In this case wonder ceases immediately; and the
subject, in discovering that the rarity was only a cheat of seem-
ing, feels himself the victim of a trick. — Suppose, for example,
that in the course of excavating for the foundations of a "sky-
scraper" a laborer came across, many, many feet beneath the
surface of the ground, a spherical, curiously marked object,
which he at first took for a human skull, but which on closer
examination proved to be merely a piece of rock. The wonder
of the first moment would quickly vanish in something like
amusement or disgust at the curio. On the other hand, any
wonder at the curious similarity of the rock to a human head
would resolve itself into Case 4, mentioned below.
2. Where an actual rarity still remains after the explana-
tion has been given. — In this case wonder is retained, but with
a gradually decreasing vividness. — Suppose, again, that the
object found by the laborer really was a human skull, but that
later-^ it was explained, upon investigation, that the skull was
the fossilized remainder of a prehistoric man of the Bronze
Age. Evidently the explanation leaves the object still a rarity,
and the wonder experienced at the discovery of the rarity
durates after the explanation. This duration of wonder, how-
ever, does not invalidate our original assumption of the relation
between wonder and ignorance; for, true to the nature of that
assumption, the wonder in this case is subject to a gradually
decreasing vividness. That skull, placed on the laborer's mantel-
piece, would soon cease to be to the laborer himself the object
of wonder it was at first. To understood rarity one becomes
accustomed. Time and knowledge both weary the wonder.
-0 Compare above, p. 55.
2'^ Often the explanation is given first, the rarity itself occurring later.
Thus, one may have stuilied all there is to be known about volcanoes; yet
his first sight of an actual eruption will cause him something more than
surprise and other than curiosity.
64 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS.
3. Where the rarity is lost, altJiough no explanation is ascer-
tained. — Here the rarity is lost by the multiplication of similar
objects. Wonder dies a speedy death under this circumstance. —
If such skulls were found daily and in all parts of the city,
or region, even though there were no sure explanation, they
would soon cease to be regarded as wonderful.
4. Where the rarity remains, and no explanation is given. —
In this case there is no multiplication of the objects of rarity;
and the sense of wonder keeps only a precarious life because
it is subject to the corroding effect of time. — For instance, one
such skull might have been found and ignorantly guarded by
the laborer against all publicity and chance of explanation.
The wonder, then, would first rise, and later wane, describing
a curve, as it were. At length a period would be reached when
the wonder, while yet present at more and more infrequent
intervals of special reflection, would be but pale or altogether
absent for the greater part of the time.
5. Where rarity is kept, but one or more hypotheses, indefi-
nitely felt or definitely presented, are disregarded, left unex-
plored, — the mind refusing to concentrate upon them because
it prefers the idleness of wonder to the exertion of curiosity.
Often — perhaps because of the natural inertia of the mind, or
it may be because of what Ribot so vaguely calls the innate love
of the marvellous — often the mind deliberately prefers the ab-
sence of explanation. To this case we sliall return when speak-
ing of the pathology of wonder.^^ For the present we need
only suppose that the laborer was an imaginative, credulous fel-
low, much given to mysteries and miracles — perhaps a religious
fanatic — who deliberately disregarded the explanation of his
find as a fossil remain, and held it instead to be a saintly relic
revealed to him for his particular and secret advantage. In a
credulous community such an object might easily find its way
into the sacred relics of the church.^® Here, also, belong the
2« The pathology of wonder will bn (liscuss('(l in another paper.
20 Compare Johnson's excoriation of the ignorant and lazy intellect
which prefers the ease of wonder to the labor of reason : ' ' What they
cannot immediately conceive, they consider as too high to be reached, or
too extensive to be comprehended; they therefore content themselves with
the gaze of folly, forbear to attempt what they have no hope of performing,
and resign the pleasure of rational contc^mplation to more pertinacious study
or more active faculties." — The Eamblcr, July 9, l?/)!.
TEE PSYCnOLOGY OF WONDER. 65
"wonder, and no end of wondering" that the ignorant, super-
stitious mind experiences when it attributes some rarity in
experience "to ghost, to witch, to fairy, or to fiend." Expe-
riences of the sort are, of course, multiplied and magnified in
the telling; and so they soon progress into absolute impossibili-
ties, and travel out of the realm of experiential rarity and won-
der into that of 'literary' marvel. Dr. Beattie, speaking of
second sight among the Highlanders, quotes the following poem,
with the remark that "what in history or philosophy would
make but an awkward figure, may sometimes have a charming
effect in poetry."
* * E 'er since of old the haughty Thanes of Ross
(So to the simple swain tradition tells)
Were wont, with clans and ready vassals throng 'd.
To wake the bounding stag, or guilty wolf;
There oft is heard at midnight, or at noon.
Beginning faint, but rising still more loud
And nearer, voice of hunters and of hounds.
And horns, hoarse-winded, blowing far and keen,
Forthwith the hubbub multiplies; the gale
Labours with wilder shrieks, and rifer din
Of hot pursuit; the broken cry of deer,
Mangled by throttling dogs; the shouts of men,
And hoofs thick-beating on the hollow hill.
Sudden, the grazing heifer in the vale
Starts at the tumult, and the herdsman's ears
Tingle with inward dread. Aghast he eyes
The mountain's height, and all the ridges round;
Yet not one trace of living wight, discerns:
Nor knows, o'eraw'd and trembling as he stands,
To what, or whom, he owes his idle fear.
To ghost, to witch, to fairy, or to fiend;
But wonders ; and no end of wondering finds. ' 'so
6. Lastly, and perhaps to a philosophic mind most signifi-
cant, as it is most general, is the case where both rarity aud
lack of explanation are created for any object in the vniverse
by isolating it in thought from its environment. — It requires
but the focusing of the attention exclusively upon any one thing,
however humble or mighty, from a blade of spear-grass to Sirius
^'^ Albania, a poem. London 1737, folio. Beattie, J., Essays on Poetry
and Music, Edinb. 1778, p. 185.
66 STUDIES IN TUE MAEVELLOUS.
himself, in order to render that object a supernal and unac-
countable wonder. Divorce the commonest detail from its shel-
tering cluster of accustomed relations, and the sense of being
baffled in the face of questions of nature and origin is so over-
whelming that, though a thousand times and more the thing
may have been tacitly accepted and used as a perfectly under-
stood object, yet the entire mystery of life itself is felt to be
gathered into its particular circle.
On Earth, in Air, amidst the Seas and Skies,
Mountainous Heaps of Wonders rise;
Whose tow 'ring Strength will ne'er submit
To Reason's Batt'ries, or the Mines of Wit.^i
The significance of the case is w^ell summed up by Lazarus:
*'In der nothwendigen Isolirung der Betrachtung liegt die
psychologische Ursache fiir die Anschauung des Wunders als
solehen, daher aber kann jede einzelne Naturerscheinung wie
ein "Wunder auf den Besehauer wirken, wenn er die Betrach-
tung absichtlich isolirt. . . . Sobald wir aber dasselbe Ding
in seinem realen Zusammenhang mit anderen sehen, verschwin-
det das Gefiihl des Wunderbaren. Die wissenschaftliche Be-
trachtung kennt kein Wunder, weil sie die Erscheinungen nie-
mals isolirt, stets nach den Ursachen sucht und auch die nicht
sogleich gefundenen stets mit Gewissheit in anderen endlichen
Erscheinungen voraussetzt. "^- The last statement is, of course,
exact only in an ideal fashion. Even scientific curiosity, as we
have observed, is hardly ever so well trained as entirely to give
over wondering at the rare in its fields of experience.
It is necessary to pause a moment for the purpose of pro-
viding against any misconception of the relations between won-
der and curiosity that might arise from a treatment so schematic
as the one hitherto adopted. For the purposes of clear exposi-
tion the state of wonder has been represented as though it were
alwaj's subsequent to states of curiosity. Now, while the apogee
of wonder is indeed reached after the failure of curiosity to
find a solution, the lesser degrees of wonder do not always and
only occur subsequent to the attempts of curiosity. On the con-
31 Matthew Prior, An Ode, 1688.
32 M. Lazarus, Das Leben der Seelc, Berlin 1883, I, 299.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF irONDEE. 67
trary, wonder may often precede curiosity. A momentary obliv-
ion of hypotheses may allow wonder the position of priority.
Eeason may be caught napping, and so the field momentarily
may be left to wonder. This case is somewhat subject to con-
fusion with the fifth of the six typical cases above — the case
where inertia of mind prefers the quiescent condition of wonder
to the energetic search for reasons. Still more confusing is its
relation to astonishment; and it is probable that the majority
of cases where wonder is thought to precede curiosity are really
cases of that temporary paralj^sis of mental function we have
called amazement.
Again, wonder and curiosity exist side by side. If wonder,
in its aspect of baffled reason, may be partially defined as the
feeling-tone of the failure to adapt rationally a new relation to
the fund of old relations held in memory, it logically follows
that every attempt at adaptation, every passing in trial of suc-
cessive hypotheses, will be attended with the sense of partial
failure, and, therefore, with the feeling of incipient wonder.
Moreover, this momentary failure of each successive hypothesis
adumbrates a final failure of all hypotheses, — the possibility of
an ultimate, complete bafflement. This is indeed the rule of
experience. So closely do stages of lapsing wonder and tenta-
tive hypothesis follow one upon another, that the ordinary mind
does not distinguish between them, as is clearly witnessed by
the confusion of wonder and curiosity in the common phrase "I
wonder what this is?"; or "I wonder if this is right, or that?"
Such phrases are constantly used while curiosity is in full
swing; and to say '*I wonder what this is," is equivalent to
saying "I am curious to know what this is." The phrase un-
consciously attests the fact that wonder and curiosity are after
all inextricably intermingled, — if they are not two aspects, the
one emotional and the other intellectual, of the same process.
Wonder is primarily an emotion of the mind — the sensory ac-
companiment, as it were, of the mental and motor activities of
curiosity. It reaches its acme when the mental attempt at adap-
tation, having failed, exists only potentially as a suspense of
the faculties engaged in the adaptative processes.
CS STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS.
But that pause of the faculties, that suspense of the pro-
cesses, that moment of complete wonder, is itself recognized by
the mind as one of its characteristic states, and remembered as
such. Thus, and the point is extremely important, wonder be-
comes a concept. The emotion receives its conceptual baptism;
and henceforward it is recognized as an intellectual category.
From this double nature of wonder — its experience as an emo-
tion and its recognition as a conceptual state — have come the
extreme confusion of its contradictory usages as a term, and
the difficulty of its analysis and psj^chological description.-''^
The concept of wonder, when once established, is liable,
especially in uneducated minds, to frequent and immediate as-
sociation with all unusual stimuli. A strange creaking of doors
at night, tappings at the window-sill or at the bed-post, the
creepy sensations of fear itself at such times, immediately call
up the wonder concept ; and associations so formed issue in the
various forms of spiritual superstition. Indeed, it may be said
that in such superstition the association of unusual experiences
with the wonder concept has, by long repetition, become im-
mediate and habitual, if not instinctive. Rational curiosity plays
but small part in such a state of mind ; indeed, rational curiosity
is throttled by superstition. In this and similar ways the won-
der concept comes to be employed so repeatedly and universally
that it is often felt to have an existence of its owm in the scheme
of things — to be an entity, or law of exceptions, from which
proceed all that is unusual, improbable, or, according to ordi-
nary rule, impossible. And, finally, the readiness with which
the concept comes to be applied reacts upon its stimulus, so
that many a minor circumstance, which otherwise might have
escaped notice, comes to be felt as extraordinary.
33 This double nature of wonder explains the peculiar relations of won-
der to the corroding effect of time. On the one hand, because of the
extremely transitory nature of that suspense which gives the emotional
acme of wonder, the emotion is entirely subject to the deadening effects
of time; on the other hand, the idea of wonder remains, is dimmed by
time far more gradually, and is capable of resuscitation or reinvigoration
at any moment. Of course, the reinvigoration of the idea is usually at-
tended with a more or less acute resurrection of the emotion; but in this
case the stimulus is, as it were, second-hand (being the memory of a
state, and not the original state itself), and so can rarely revive the emotion
in its original intensity.
TEE PSYCHOLOGY OF TV ON DEE. 69
In turn, to create the further confusion of gods and miracles,
the mind, by its usual mj-thological trick of externalizing its
workings in nature, has dubbed the stimuli of the wonder state
wonderful — has personified its own feelings of itself in external
events and appearances, and then has explained the former by
the latter on the old magical fallacy that like causes like. Such
unconscious reasoning in a circle is still a part of our present-
day mythology.
But superstition, and gods and miracles, are carrying the
argument beyond the consideration of the eases of mere rarity
into the higher degrees of the unusual. It is possible now to
turn to these higher degrees.
The unusual that is improbable demands first attention.
It is to be noted, at once, that the improbable is more often
told, than experienced ; for actual experience clouds improba-
bility with the tangibility of an occurrence, and reduces its
character to one of mere rarity. Consequently, the improbable
is usually encountered in the tales of others, or in the imaginative
retrospection of the teller himself. In literature, therefore, which
in some of its forms is a worked-over tale, the improbable may be
expected to thrive as in its native tropics. There, too, its con-
ceptual character, its character of an inference from the rule of
experience, will find its expression in the crafty marshalling of
experiences not by the laws of natural chance, but by the judg-
ment of the artist.
In the second place, it must be at once conceded that the
inferential character of the concept of improbability may con-
tain on the bare face of it a skepticism bj'^ no means favorable
to wonder. Thus, for example, the very pronouncing as im-
probable the tale of the Czar's visit to Gretchen may intimate
a disbelief which would sooner ridicule the tale than see its
wonder. Improbability, as a judgment advanced with definite
assurance, certainly produces laughter rather than wonder.
But, on the other hand, the nature of improbability is by
no means constant. Its concept is subject always to the change
incident to its relative character. Tlie individual who realizes
this fact more or less clearly, or who temperamentally is in-
clined to wavering convictions, not seldom advances the ridi-
70 STUDIES IN THE MAHVELLOVS.
cule of improbability with very feeble assurance. Constantly
feeling that the improbable is not impossible, but that it may
be only a higher and rarer degree of the unusual, he is by no
means ready to indulge in hasty ridicule. To him the improb-
ability increases the wonder. His mind, very likely, has already
developed a readiness to apply the wonder concept. Therefore,
the hesitancy of mental adaptation, which the improbable
arouses in him, is brought into immediate association with won-
der. And it is the very contradictory nature of this vacillating,
undetermined state of mind, where judgment varies from a
half-hearted assertion of skepticism to the undecided feeling of
wonder, and back again, that serves best of all to keep the state
of wonder alive and vivid. But of that further, when the re-
lations of belief and wonder are considered by themselves.
Here it must be added that when the improbable is taken
in this sense, as a higher and rarer degree of the unusual, its
relation to curiosity brings out a new aspect which should be
strongly emphasized. In all cases so far considered, both those
of suddenness and rarity, there has always been the possibility
of a state of curiosity intervening between the stimulus and
the wonder state; and the curiosity has depended, as it always
does, upon the attempt at mental adaptation. With the baffle-
ment of that attempt, wonder has succeeded. But in the case
of the distinctly improbable (a Dr. Jekyll and Mr, Hyde story,
for instance; or, better still, the story of a trip to the moon
and back: supposing, in both cases, no explanation is offered
of the circumstances) the immediate recognition of the wild
divergence from the probable tends to abbreviate, or even, in
some cases, entirely abrogate, the state of curiosity in favor of
one of wonder or marvel. Within the bounds of belief the
very improbability clouds the effort of curiosity to find a suffi-
cient explanation, and gives in advance a sense of the abortive-
ness in which the effort must end. Afterwards, to be sure, the
habit of curiosity, the forlorn hope of gaining some clue to the
more than remarkable condition, may occasion some effort, more
or less abortive, toward finding a solution. But the stronger
the improbability, the less hope there is in such effort. At any
rate, the effort is in the great majority of cases secondary to
the wonder state.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WONDER. 71
The relation of improbability to explanatory hypotheses, and
to the feeling of the marvellous, may be summarized in five
cases corresponding to the first five of the six cases in which
the relations of rarity to explanation and wonder have already
been tabulated.^* For the sake of clearness the phraseology of
the former passage is copied here verbatim.
1. "Where a seeming improbability ceases with the giving of
the explanation. — In this case marvelling ceases immediately;
the subject, in discovering that the improbability was only a
cheat of seeming, feels himself the victim of a trick. Mrs. Rad-
cliffe's marvels are of this sort. In The Mysteries of Udolpho,
for instance, the Something behind the veil in Montoni's castle,
the weird singing in the woods of St. Clair, and Ludovico's dis-
appearance, are but three of numberless cases where a marvel
lasts through many chapters only to be explained tamely as a
most matter-of-fact affair when one's suspense has reached the
breaking point. It is impossible to keep up a show of marvel
when the explanation reveals the rarity as an imposition.
2. Where an actual improbability still remains after the
explanation has been given. — In this case marvelling persists,
but, in general, with a gradually decreasing vividness. In Haw-
thorne's Rappacini's Daughter, the wonderful Beatrice is at
last understood as one who "had been nourished with poisons
from her birth upward, until her whole nature was so imbued
with them that she herself had become the deadliest poison in
existence. Poison was her element of life. With that rich per-
fume of her breath she blasted the very air. Her love would have
been poison." — "Is this not a marvellous tale?" asks Baglioni. —
Yes, a marvel to explain a marvel; or, as it may be stated, an
improbability still an improbability after the explanation ! It
need hardly be pointed out that the objection that this explana-
tion does not scientifically and exactly explain anything, is
quite beside the mark. Under most circumstances, other things
being equal, the very lapse of time will produce a gradual
weakening of the feeling of the marvellous in this case.
3. Where the sense of improbability is lost, although no ex-
planation is ascertained. — Here the sense of improbability is lost.
3* See above, pp. 63 ff.
72 STUDIES IN THE MABVELLOUS.
because, by the multiplication of similar improbabilities, we lose
the very sense of their improbability. IMarvelling dies a speedy
death under this circumstance. The constant repetition of im-
probable prowess upon the part of the heroes of fairy-stories,
the endless rehearsal of the improbable doughtiness of the
knights in Le Morte d' Arthur (provided, always, one is read-
ing credulously like a child, and providing, also, one's reading
is continuous enough to realize the repetition) have undeniably
a dulling effect upon our capacity for marvelling. The effect
is analogous to that loss of the sense of the marvellous that
would ensue in real life could we conceive of Beatrice Rappa-
cinis becoming as common as Mary Smiths. Even though there
were no more explanation than accompany the Mary Smiths,
these Beatrice Rappacinis could not be felt as marvellous.
Repetition establishes probability, fact ; it destroys improbability.
4. Where the sense of improbability is kept, and no explana-
tion is presented. — In this case there is no multiplication of the
objects of improbability^ ; and the feeling of the marvellous keeps
only a precarious life (unless complicated by other emotions, such
as fear^^), because it is subject to the corroding effect of time.
To refer to Hawthorne's tale again, one might be forced so
constantly to live with, or see, the beautiful but baleful Beatrice,
that, although one never learned her secret, the marvel of her,
while yet recognized at intervals of special reflection, would be
hardly felt, or altogether absent, for the greater part of the time.
In literature, the case is represented by the curve of marvelling
— first rising, and then, with time, falling — which credulity
describes in repeated readings of Beo^vulf's fight with Grendel,
or of the slaying of Goliath by David, or of the destruction of
the palace by Samson. After imagination has played its part
and intensified the marvel, after the marvel has become a well-
known story, often repeated, thoroughly familiar, — its pristine
power is dimmed, not to be revived except under peculiar and
infrequent circumstances. But the marvel that springs from
the improbable has a greater initial force and a slower decline
than the wonder that springs from mere rarity.
35 See below, p. 90.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WONDEB. 73
5. Where improbability is kept, but one or more indefinite
hypotheses, vaguely felt, are disregarded, left unexplored, — the
mind refusing to concentrate upon them because it prefers the
idleness of marvelling to the exertion of curiosity. — Often —
perhaps because of the natural inertia of the mind, or, it may be,
because of what Ribot so vaguely calls the innate love of the
marvellous — often the mind deliberately prefers the absence of
explanation. For the present, an example may be drawn from
Tieck's tale of The Goblet as translated in Carlyle's German
liomance.^^ When Old Albert places the beautiful gold cup
between himself and Ferdinand, and the wonderful form begins
to rise from it, mist-like, gradually clearing in outline, many
a reader would fain forget the indicated explanations of auto-
hypnosis and suggestion in order to revel in the rarity of the
show. Or Aylmer's tricks of legerdemain, in Hawthorne's tale.
The Birthmark, though confessedly the work of a cunning sci-
entist familiar with the mirror-tricks of illusion, are yet, by
many a mind, too strongly felt as wonderful to allow any hunt-
ing up of the half-forgotten chapters of a text-book on physics.
The contrary-to-fact degree, or stage, of the unusual, which
begins to make its appearance with the improbable, rises to its
height in the next aspect of our subject, — the impossible. With
the impossible, as with the improbable, belief is a necessary
prerequisite to the wonder state. But it will be better to post-
pone the discussion of belief to a separate category, and to
assume for the present that the impossible may and does even-
tuate in wonder under the tutelage of whatever may be the
proper degree or kind of belief.
When the divergence from the rule of experience is carried
into the realm ordinarily designated as the impossible, there is
a perfect absence of the rational hypotheses of curiosity by the
very nature of the case. Witches, hobgoblins, land of faery,
Joshua's ruling of the sun, Circe's magical pranks, the descent
of Orpheus to Hades, — these, and all their kind, suggest rational
hypotlieses only to comparative mythologists. Wonder and
spirits are here supreme. This is wonder's own stronghold:
Carlyle, German Romance, ed. II. D. Traill, N. Y. 1901, I, 369.
74 STUDIES IN THE MAEVELLOUS.
the outposts are the improbable; the citadel is the impossible.
From outpost to citadel the story of wonder extends as in a
climax, until upon the citadel itself we behold, in an apotheosis
of wonder, the dead risen to life and time turned backward in
its course. The world is filled with magicians and their famil-
iars. Scop and trouhadour sing of enchantment. We more
than wonder. We marvel.
Here, then, at last, is the marvellous. It stands at the apex
of a general tendency away from the ordinary, which, after taking
its rise in small matters of sudden stimuli, and passing on
through a multiplicity of grades of the merely rare, finally cul-
minates in the higher reaches of the improbable and impossible.
The marvellous is a step out of reality. Because of that very
fact, the marvellous naturally belongs rather to the tale of
imagination than to the reality of physical adventure. What
but telling can involve the marvellous, — what but that telling
which sooner or later finds its way into the form of literature?
Illusions and hallucinations, or, from a different point of view,
miracles and visions, are the only exceptions to this rule of the
unexperienced; and they, because of the supreme individual
necessity' of telling them to one's fellows, also must soon find
themselves brought into literary form, or some precursory con-
dition of such form. It is strange enough, and a fact that can-
not be insisted upon too strongly, that the very passing out of
actual fact, the very escape from hypothesis, is what throws the
marvellous into the arms of literature. Here is indeed to the
front the lying genius of words, — that wondrous capability that,
judged from a moral point of view, afforded Greek philosophy,
as we have already seen, the all too pious beginning of a literary
criticism of the marvellous.^^
37 Present usage of the term marvellous illustrates this character of
impossibility. Nowadays, the marvel j)ar excellence is the tale of spirit-
ualisin, the alleged feat of clairvoyance, the miracle of the Church. These
things, directly contrary to usual experience, transcending the possible as
we ordinarily conceive the possible, are the things that we now commonly
term marvels. True, we say such and such a piece of acting is "marvel-
lously well done"; but the very attempt, of which we are conscious, to
reach after the most superlative word in our effort at that polite compli-
ment, is x)roof in itself of the exaggeration of circumstance to which the
word strictly belongs. "Wonderfully well done," would be the truer
phrase, signifying "rarely well done"; marvellous should be reserved for
those cases that smack decidedly of the improbable and impossible.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WON DEE. 75
In the rising plane of wonder states established by the gradual
ascent from suddenness and mere rarity to the improbable and
impossible, it would be very convenient if we could draw a divid-
ing line across the middle and call all states and stimuli belong-
ing to the lower half — the sudden and unusual classes — wonder-
ful; and all states and stimuli belonging to the higher half — the
improbable and impossible — marvellous. This limitation of terms
is, in fact, here proposed; and henceforth, throughout this book,
the terms will be used, technically, under this limitation. That
for such a technical distinction there is some warrant in the
general use of the words, is at once obvious from the previous
discussion of usage.^® Marvellous is indeed a heavier term than
wonderful, and contains in its fringe of sublimer and more awful
association the warrant for such a limitation.
But to return to our analysis. The careful reader may have
discovered an apparent flaw in the reasoning of the last para-
graph but one. INIiracles and visions were there cited as excep-
tions to the rule that marvels cannot be experienced, and yet,
in the .same breath, they were put forward as examples of the
impossible. The marvellous seems with a vengeance to have
carried us beyond the bounds of the logical. What can solve
this difficulty, and also, at the same time, remove another ob-
jection, which must have been felt by every mind, viz, that the
very impossibility cited destroys by its irrationality the sense
of the marvellous and substitutes that of the ridiculous? The
answer is not far to seek. Surprise, curiosity, — these have led us
to wonder. Our next clue contains the reply to the present diffi-
culty. Belief ! There is the factor in the wonder-complex which
steps into the logical breach, renders the impossible possible to
experience, and drives the ridiculous from the citadel of marvel.
Belief makes all things possible without destroying the magic
land of the impossible. It does this by its own irrationality. By
accepting as real what reason warns it is impossible, belief is
■■"* See above, pp. 8-13. One can hardly use the long phrase 'the emotion
of marvelling' each time it is necessary to speak of that emotion. For this
reason, it has been necessary to e.xteml the meaning of the word 'marvel'
to designate the 'emotion of marvelling'; just as 'wonder' designates the
'emotion of wondering.' 'Marvel,' with this new meaning, will often be
found in the following pages.
76 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS.
enabled to keep the sense of the impossible while denying it.
As Principal Jevons remarks, "the tenacity with which a belief
is held does not vary with the reasonableness of the belief or
the amount of evidence for it ; but, on the contrary, those people
are usually most confident in their opinions who have the least
reason to be so. "^^ Thus, while to unbelief visions are hallu-
cinations and miracles are illusions, they are to belief particular
realities that do not destroy the general concept of impossibility.
And as such they, and their like, are marvellous, — not ridiculous.
The impossible, says belief, is possible in rare cases, perhaps
in very rare cases. In one word, it is through belief that im-
possibility comes to be regarded as the supreme case of the un-
usual, or of rarity.
Thus belief makes marvel,*" — that is, clears the way for the
development of marvel. But marvel also makes belief. The
vividness with which a miraculous event first stirs the emotion
of wonder, before the mind has busied itself logically with sug-
gestions of irrationality and doubt, has much to do with the
perpetuation of the belief in the miracle. Other things being
equal — that is, supposing in a given individual the rational
index remains constant under a series of suggestions of the
miraculous — the greater the initial emotion of wonder, the more
durable will be the belief in the miracle. This follows from the
general proposition that vividness in any emotion tends to in-
duce a belief in the reality of the object or supposed cause of
the emotion. Familiar examples of this general truth are found
in the emotional make-believe of children, where the very vivid-
ness of the emotions aroused tends always to give the zest of
reality to the childish fiction ; and in the illusion of the stage
or the novel, where, again, the vivid emotional participation
of the spectator or participant temporarily cheats him into a
belief in the reality of the dramatic fiction. Who has not read
some weird and awful book*^ far into the wee hours of the night
and had his fear of vampires and were-wolves so vividly aroused
30 F. B. Jevons, Introd. to Eistory of Bdigion, London 1902, p. 20.
<o Cf. above, note 38.
•♦1 Like Bram Stoker's The Vampire, for instance, or Robert Chambers'
The King in Yellow.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WONDEE. 77
that he has found himself half-believing, for a moment, those
horrible fictions, and starting nervously at ghostly tappings of
the breeze on the window lest they might be the mysteriously
fascinating call of the vampire? What so subtly persuades us to
the illusion of reality' as this intense play of emotions? Pain
inveigles us into belief in the very desperate reality of the suf-
ferings of Lear and Othello; joy persuades us unawares into
belief in the rollicking reality of Falstaff.
The very simulation of emotions by those who are dramat-
ically inclined leads such actors into a confusion of fact and make-
believe, until they can with difficulty tell when they are acting
and when not. The emotions are always attached to objects:
when the emotions are intensely active the mind naturally as-
sumes the objects, and assiunes them as real because the emo-
tions are real. This is the "sympathetic magic" of the emotions.
Wonder, therefore, or marvelling, to speak more strictly, as
one of the emotions, will, when vividly stirred, produce this
tendency to belief. Let the individual once experience the
glamor of a great marvel; let him once feel the ecstasy of the
Herculean demi-god whose powers transcend ordinary physical
limitations; let him once take part in the voyage to the Hes-
perides, in the cleansing of the Augean Stables, in the magic of
Jack the Giant Killer, in the quest of the Graal, in the mystery
of Parzival, — and his belief in the reality of these powers and
adventures is so in love with itself that, against his own mind's
later and calmer suggestion of irrationality, he will cry out, like
Tertullian, '^ possible quia impossible est." Have not the marvels
of the church always been a chief ally in gaining the belief
of a certain class? The air of awe and sublime wonder in a
stately cathedral overtakes even the mind of the skeptic, and he
finds himself, under that glamor, moving faintly back to the
belief of his childhood. Lost in marvelling at the legerdemain
of the Hindu fakir, we forget for a moment that what we see is
not real."*- Who does not marvel at Wagner's Parzival until
his imagination is gripped with a great reality? even though it
42 Of course the "seeing" is a stronger ally of belief than the mar-
velliug; biit the marvelling also persuades us. What we feel seems real,
as well as what we see; and here the feeling, the marvelling, is occasioned
by what we see.
78 STUDIES IN THE MAEVELLOVS.
be the transcendeutal persuasiou that there is a reality, a real-
ness, to the spiritual truth emboclied there? Is not the very
transcendental character of that persuasion of reality the very
cry of TertuUian? just the marvel-bred assumption of another
infinite world, not limited, like this world, by the possible?
Other minds find themselves half-believing in the marvellous
reincarnation drama in Rider Haggard's two books, She and
Ayesha. So the tale of examples might progress indefinitely. Nor
is it claimed here that in every example the vividness of the
marvel alone produces the impulse to a belief in the reality of the
object; such impulses are of course complex. But it is claimed
that vivid marvelling aids that im]nilse mightily.
What admits of this initial vividness of marvel is, of course,
a certain show of probability, — just the show that will be suf-
ficient at first to impose upon the degree of rationality possessed
by the individual. "Probable impossibilities," says Aristotle,
"are to be preferred to improbable possibilities."*^ "When this
condition is united with a great initial intensity of marvel, even
the sternest of logical minds wavers, and remembers fearfully
that after all we move in a world unknown, against a black
background of infinite possibility. ^Marvel makes belief, and
belief makes marvel: they act upon each other in a circular
fashion — a vicious circle, maybe — but a circle surely!
Let us consider again the necessity of belief to marvel. Be-
lief is, indeed, necessary to all cases of wonder, particularly to
the marvellous; but only in certain degrees or measures is it
consonant with the continuance of that emotion. We have al-
ready noticed the ridicule that results, instead of marvelling,
when the impossible encounters perfect disbelief. To such dis-
belief a unicorn is a stimulus to impatience and raillery, and
the marvellous is a synonym for the exploded beliefs and fancies
of crude ages or uneducated masses. Indeed, there exists,
through the medium of belief, a curious relation between the
marvellous and the comic. The two are quarrelsome first cousins,
as it were. Given a belief of some sort — actual or poetic — in
the improbabilities and impossibilities of medieval romances,
and wonder and marvel stand forth claiming our serious delight
■»- See above, p. 39.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WONDEB. 79
and reverence; but given a disbelief in the same objects— in
magical swords, and astonishing prowess, and miracles of the
Graal — and immediately the mockery of Cervantes routs the
marvellous with a flapping of windmills. To Butler the wonder-
prating Puritan becomes a Hudibras; Swift sneers out his dis-
belief in The Tale of a Tuh. All marvels become comic when
deserted by belief; but all comedy by no means becomes mar-
vellous when nurtured by a careful belief. Thus, the underlying
pretension of the marvellous — its basic weakness of the fictitious
and of an imaginative, a priori assumption — is exposed, in con-
trast to the greater, simpler truth of comedy. Comedy is the
cure of the marvellous, its natural antidote — the antidote found
in close proximity to the dangerous object, just as in the field
(it used to be said) nature always arranges poison and antidote
side by side.
But the individual who passes from the intellectual stage
that ridicules the older marvels, to the further stage of a seri-
ous, philosophical skepticism, is, curiously enough, again on
the road to marvel. When the universe becomes one great hesi-
tation, and doubt, or even agnosticism, confronts the mind at
every turn, there comes stealing back upon the heart the sense
of everlasting mystery and wonder. The skeptic has purified
the mystery of life of its anthropomorphic thaumaturgy, but in
doing that he has cut loose from certain relations that pretended
to explain things by man-conceived marvels: the original mys-
tery — more mysterious than the man-made marvel — confronts
him forever. He finds himself in the position of philosophic
wonder, already described above as the sixth case under
the relations of rarity, explanation, and wonder." Indeed, the
historical and psychological course of the development of won-
der may be said to reach from anthropomorphic thaumaturgy,
through the burlesque and parody and satire of that thauma-
turgy, on to the philosophic wonder of the serious skeptic or
agnostic.
But full and perfect belief is only less dangerous to the mar-
vellous than full disbelief. For by full belief the marvel is
quickly assimilated, is associated in a hierarchy of similar im-
<■* See above, p. 65.
80 STUDIES IN THE MAEFELLOUS.
possibilities, and so is laid open to the constant danger of losing
its anomalous character and of blunting its uniqueness in the
mass of the fully accommodated. The impossibility ceases act-
ively to be felt as such. The extreme case of this sort is that
of the undeveloped or uncritical miiul that has accepted marvels
as matters of fact, relying implicitly upon authority, — as a child
in his religious belief, or a savage in his traditions. To the
unlearned mind, incapable of conceiving of transgressions of
natural law, no conception of impossibility as such is possible.
Minor wonder such a mind may experience when rarities in its
narrow daily experience occur; but marvels of creation, demi-
urgic power, and the like, suggest no further wonder than that
accompanying the sense of exaggerated power.*'* Such a mind
may wonder, but it cannot marvel.
Somewhere, then, between absolute disbelief and perfect be-
lief, somewhere in the region of alternating doubt and belief,*"
but with the greater weight on the latter, lies that degree or
sort of belief that is the greatest abettor of wonder and marvel.
Before leaving this important clue of belief it will be well
to summarize the relations of belief to the five cases of improba-
bility drawn up above.*^
I. Very often the exploration of an improbability reduces
the case of improbability to one of mere rarity. The mysterious
disappearance of Ludovico,*® for instance, from the haunted
room in the castle, seems due to the awful influence of the un-
quiet spirits who were supposed to infect the chamber. But
when this improbability, or impossibility, is explained, some
chapters later, by the information that certain bandits had been
in the habit of entering the room through a secret tunnel and
45 See below, p. 94.
48 If the term belief were generally understood to mean just this alter-
nation, the greater part of this attempt at specification of meaning would
of course be unnecessary. Professor Baldwin argues that "a conflict
between the established, the habitual, the taken for granted, on the one
hand, and the new, raw, and violent, on the other hand, is necessary to
excite doubt, which is the preliminary to belief." (J. M. Baldwin, Men-
tal Development, New York 1000, p. .32.3 and Note 1.) But the confusion
between philosophical, scientific, and popular uses of the word appears to
make necessary an extended statement of the relation of "belief" to
wonder and marvel.
47 See above, pp. 71-73.
48 See above, p. 71.
TRE PSYCHOLOGY OF WONDEB. 8J
making it their rendezvous, and that they had carried off Ludo-
vico through this tunnel, the improbability is at once reduced to
the rank of a mere rarity. Such reductions in rank leave the
improbability in one or the other of the first two cases of mere
rarity.*^
(a) Now, if one's belief has been excited by such a spurious
improbability as that of the spiriting away of Ludovico,^** the
explanation that shows that the improbability was really only a
cheat of seeming, leaves the believer annoyed at the trick that has
been played upon him, — often so annoyed that he loses not only
his first marvel, but also any wonder that otherwise might have
attached to the rarity of the unsuspected and skilfully
hidden tunnel. Disbelief in the improbability, on the other
hand, would only have its attendant ridicule of the mystery
aggravated by the explanation of the marvel's spurious char-
acter.
(b) In the case of Rappacini 's daughter,^^ where the improb-
ability of her weird beauty is "explained" by the further im-
probability of her diet of poisons, the very retention of the
attitude of marvelling is dependent upon one's belief in the sec-
ond improbability^ Otherwise the explanation would not ex-
plain, but would only heap further ridicule upon a circumstance
already under smiling suspicion. The explanation of improba-
bility by improbabilities is illogical ; but belief is not cast down
by the lack of logic, and out of the irrationality springs the
marvel.
II. (a) Where no explanation of the improbability is given,
full belief in the improbability practically reduces all possible
cases of unexplained improbability to the third ease above,'^- —
where familiarity with the marvel destroys its emotional sugges-
tiveness. In romance, full belief in the improbable prowess of
the Christian conquerors of the Saracens renders that prowess
almost as matter-of-fact as does its constant repetition. The
sense of contrast with modern feats of arms is always present,
49 See above, p. 63.
80 Case No. I, above, p. 71.
51 Case No. II, above, p. 71.
52 See above, p. 71.
82 STUDIES IN THE MAEFELLOUS.
but the sense of that difference, and its imaginative apprecia-
tion, are dulled alike by endless repetition of the marvel and
by an absolute, matter-of-fact belief in its reality. Again, full
belief in Beatrice Rappacini — with absolutely no question or
doubt — would be equivalent, practically, to living among a J\Iary-
Smith-multitude of Beatrice Rappacinis.
(6) A vacillation of belief and doubt (i.e., belief proper)
in connection with an unexplained improbability, results in an
extension of the fourth case." That case, it may be recalled, is
the one where the sense of the improbable is not lost by an
ascertained explanation, but eventuates in a marvel which is
subject to the corroding effect of time. Now, belief in improba-
bility is of course necessary to a sense of the marvellous. But,
on the other hand, a belief in the marvel may involve quite defi-
nitely the irrational hypothesis of spiritual or other super-
natural power. If so — if belief applies this hypothesis to the
explanation of the original improbability — we have as an ex-
planation what may itself be regarded as an improbability or
impossibility. An improbability "explains" an improbability.
Such a twist to the case carries us over at once into the second
case, just mentioned; and, in turn, as a result of the high degree
of rarity involved, there is also a tendency to arrest that case's
rule of the decreasing vividness of the marvel. Moreover, the
marvellous circumstance associated with the greater marvel of
spiritual or magical power is always and easily susceptible of
revivification. A great variety of circumstances are continually
ministering to the revival of the marvel of the spirit. Belief
and its supernatural marvel may tire at times, may nod, and
mumble their creed; but they are only napping, — they are not
dead. Hope, humbug, and the belief in the supernatural spring
eternal in the human breast.
(c) Full disbelief in an unexplained improbability naturally
results in a spirit of ridicule that ekes out what it lacks of
explanation of the improbability, and of confirmation of its
own skeptcism, with a continual and repeated satire. Unable
to congratulate itself upon its own acumen, as in \ho. case
of the spurious marvel of Ludovico's disappearance, and rather
•''3 See above, p. 72.
TEE PSYCHOLOGY OF WONDEE. 83
inherently weakened by the continual suggestion of "it might
have been, " disbelief nevertheless makes a successful front against
the impossible by at once denying in toto the possibility of super-
lawful forces and agencies; and it lends the influence of this
skeptical position toward the impossible to its disbelief in the
improbable. Here, of course, belong the great marvel burlesques
of the world. From Don Quixote to A Yankee at King Arthur's
Court, the fun-making progresses in varied measure and kind;
but always behind the ridicule, and usually untouched by its
Rabelaisian hand, lie the greater "impossibles," which can never
be disproved or explained. As soon as the unbelieving spirit
touches these it becomes of necessity serious and dreadfully in
earnest, — a first step back, as has already been said, to the won-
der-view of the universe ; and the entering, too, of the sixth typ-
ical case of marvel.
Finally, to come to the end of the clue of belief, it need
only be said that what has been observed of the relation of belief
to the improbable is also true of its relation to the impossible,
with a certain intensification of all the processes, due to the
higher degree of "rarity" involved in the impossible. The fol-
lowing tables will serve to clarify those inter-relations of wonder,
marvel, rarity, explanation, improbability, impossibility, and
belief that have already been taken up under the six typical cases.
A. MERE RARITY— EXPLANATION— WONDER.
I Seeming rarity ceases with giving of explanation: wonder
ceases immediately.
II Actual rarity still remains after explanation has been given :
wonder retained, but with gradually decreasing viv-
idness.
III Rarity ceases, although no explanation given : wonder speed-
ily lost.
IV Rarity persists, and no explanation given : wonder gradually
lost with passing of time.
V Rarity kept, explanations disregarded: wonder in strong
ascendency.
VI Rarity gained by isolation of phenomenon from its rela-
tions : wonder in strong ascendenev.
84 STUDIES IN THE MABVELLOUS.
?
B. SENSE OF IMPROBABILITY— EXPLANATION— BELIEF-
MARVELLOUS.
I Sense of improbability, followed by explanation: often re-
duced to mere rarity. Case I or II under A. — Com-
pare, also, p. 81, above.
II Sense of improbability, no explanation :
(a) with full disbelief: ridiculous, instead of marvellous.
(6) with full belief: matter of fact, instead of marvel-
lous. Similar to ease III under A.
(c) with vacillation of belief and doubt: marvellous, sim-
ilar to Case IV under A., but with greater initial
force and slower decline.
C. SENSE OF iSlPOSSIBILITY— EXPLANATION— BELIEF-
MARVELLOUS.
I Sense of impossibility, followed by explanation : often re-
reduced to mere rarity, Case I or II, under A. — Com-
pare, also, p. 81, above.
II Sense of impossibility, no explanation :
(a) with full disbelief: ridiculous, instead of marvellous.
(6) with full belief: matter of fact, instead of marvel-
lous. Similar to Case III under A.
(c) with vacillation of belief and doubt: marvellous, sim-
ilar to Case IV under A, and Case II (c) under
B ; but with far greater initial force and far slower
decline than in either of those cases.
One of the chief characters of the marvellous may now fitly
be described. The belief in the impossible, when felt as a logical
inconsistency, leads always to the adoption of a subterfuge that
in turn opens the way to new and ever wilder marvels. The
inconsistency is universally obviated by supplying an ideal
standard of possibility. "Not probable or possible as things
go in this world," runs the remark, "but quite so in another
and more spiritual world!" Thus belief ekes out the paucity
of fact. "Uncertainty," as Bain says, "is the realm of ideal
possibility, the scope for imaginative outgoings."^"*
''* Bain, Emotions and the Will, p. 222.
TEE PSYCHOLOGY OF WONDER. 35
The free fashion in which the marvellous disports itself iu
the ideal realm of imagination is the most notable of its man-
ners. And if here its retainers are the powers of imagination,
its courts and show places are the creeds of religion and the
poetry of literature; for the realm of the ideal may belong to
poetical belief or to the faith of the pious enthusiast. In it
there is freedom,— freedom of all third dimensional limitations.
Spirit rises from flesh. And this assertion of an ideal freedom
in connection with the marvellous, or, it may be said, by the
marvellous, is the very circumstance that recommended the re-
finement of medieval and other marvel to the thirsting souls of
the patriots and literary revolutionists of Romanticism. No
wonder that the patriots of Germany nursed and flaunted their
sense of marvel! It was for the freedom in which those mar-
vels moved and had their being— not for the mere novelty and
strangeness of headless horsemen and singing trees— that those
ardent, anarchistic souls longed. Here too was the reason why
the slower, saner spirit of Wordsworth " marvellized " nature
and the commonplace; and in doing so he showed himself as
true a romanticist as Coleridge, though he went to no medieval
font for his subject and took no part in the wild Schwdrmerei
of the world beyond Cumberland. He had tried the much-
vaunted, revolutionary freedom, but had found a better one at
Rydal Mount, more to his liking and Dorothy 's.^^
The unfettering of imagination in this realm of ideal belief
demands the weight of separate mention, for any description
of wondering that neglected to emphasize the part played by the
inventive faculty in heightening the feeling of wonder would not
55 Professor Charles Mills Gayley, in his classes at the University of
California, has long preached the desire for freedom as the solvent for
the Romantic movement; and it is with great interest, therefore, that I
have found myself in this independent search into the marvellous again
and again brought face to face with just this Eeimweh for an ideal
freedom. {Cf. Gayley, C. M., Hep. Eng. Com., New York 1903, vol. I,
Introduction, Hist. View of Eng. Com., pp. xx, Ixxxvii, et passim.)
Indeed, upon reflection, Professor Gayley 's observation has the simple
inevitability of the truth. Nor can I refrain from appending the
following quotation from Lazarus: "Hieraus erkliirt sich psychologisch
hinlanglich, weshalb das Wunder des Glaubens liebstes Kind ist; der
Glaube ist Sehnsucht nach dcm Unendlichen, und hier driingt sich die
Vorstellung des Unendlichen unmittelbar bei der Erscheinung eines End-
lichon auf. Dies ist die Bedeutung des ^Yunders und ohue sie wjiren die
Wirkuugen des Wunders sclbst wuuderbar. '' — Lazarus, op. cit., p. 29S.
86 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS.
deserve its name. Imagination not only creates the marvel of
story and chanson, but is itself the creature of wonderment. The
enthralled percipient feels the stirrings, oftenest vague, and so
the more impressive, of all his imaginative being, and the aver-
tissement of self that ensues is one of the dearest, as it is one
of the most familiar of the attendants in the train of wonder.
Subtle, it is, too; possibly subtlest of the allurements of this
complex emotion ; and therewith is revealed one of the chief
reasons for the normal and almost universal desire, if not
appetency, toward experiencing the emotion. In another chap-
ter, when we turn more to the historical side, or phylogeny, as
it might be called, of wonder, the subject of imaginative activity
will receive its due consideration; but, for the present, three
points may be observed without fear of too frequent repetition :
the marvellous as a stimulus to imagination, the immediate
reaction of the state of marvelling, and the imaginative exaggera-
tion of the marvellous object itself.
Enough has been said to make clear and enforce the first point.
A baffled reason and the failure of hypotheses loose the wilder
freaks of mind. No longer held by a rational outlook, imagina-
tion is left with full title to the most riotous of living. No
vagary is too startling when the romance of other worlds
and higher powers, the authentication of the actual existence
of which is assumed by belief, is a perpetual challenge to the
invention of wizards and angels, centaurs and seraphim, apples
of Hesperides and trees of life. The marvellous is to the imagin-
ation what sleep is to dreams. Its very nature — its intangible-
ness, its puzzlement, its commerce with the unknown — is natur-
ally, perhaps physiologically, associated with the imaginative
function of the mind. Therefore it is, that, upon the establish-
ment of a state of marvelling by a particular object, all the
vague crowd of other marvels and former imaginations, rein-
forced by untold new levies, the spawn of the moment, flit upon
the mind with such instantaneous association and force of sug-
gestion that the marvel itself is increased a hundredfold. Thus,
eircle-wi.se, •"'" comes wonder stimulating imagination, the latter in
t-'J I have borrowed this term from Professor Baldwin 's ' ' circular-
imitation. ' ' Cf. Mental Development, pp. 133, 264.
TEE PSYCHOLOGY OF WONDER. 87
turn reacting to heighten the wonder, which, again, spurs on
imagination still further ; and so on indefinitely. "We may suppose
these processes of mutual encouragement to persist until fatigue,
or another stronger demand, produces a change in attention.
Often, however, they are the means of ascension into mystical
trances, such, perhaps, as those of Swedenborg or Blake, — states
that should be studied in the light of what is known of auto-
suggestion and hypnosis. Such states, indeed, form a very
proper part of the data present to the hand of the student of
wonder for analysis and classification. They are the higher
limits of the subject, the marvels of wonder. Nor should they
be regarded as fruitless of empirical results. What more sug-
gestive, physiologically, than the dream of Eliphaz?
"Now a thing was secretly brought to me,
Aud mine ear received a whisper thereof.
In thoughts from the visions of the night,
When deep sleep falleth on men,
Fear came upon me, and trembling,
Which made all my bones to shake.
Then a spirit passed before my face;
The hair of my flesh stood up.
It stood still, but I could not discern the appearance thereof;
A form was before mine eyes:
There was silence, and I heard a voice, . . ."s"
It need hardly be pointed out now that one of the effects
of imagination is to magnify and exaggerate the actual cause,
objective or subjective, of the marvelling. The stimulating ob-
ject does not remain the same to the consciousness of the percip-
ient, but, in the course of all these heightening processes of a
subjective nature, is continually changing. What was at first
a minor circumstance looms large in a disordered field of marvel
and fancy. Fear itself scarcely magnifies its object more than
wonder, for it is imagination that is let loose in both cases.
Who has not given supernatural interpretations to purely nat-
ural effects, the agency of which happened for the moment to
be unknown? The inexplicable is immediately mj^sterious.
57 Job IV, 12-16. One need only turn to medieval saints' books to
find similar descriptions of visions that come in waking hours. Cf., Jones,
B. M., Studies in Mystical Edifiion. London 1909. For further treatment of
this subject, see below, Chapters III, IV.
88 STUDIES IN THE MABVELLOUS.
Knockings and table-turuings are immediately attributed to
spirits of the dead. I have known a whole family to turn spir-
itualists because of a mysterious tapping that was heard only
at meal-times, and that afterward proved to be the chickens strik-
ing the baseboards with their bills as they fed close to the house.
That family in its first surprise, its astonishment, its fruitless
search after causes, its unsatisfied curiosity, wonder, its fear,
imagination, and its final sense of marvel as belief in spiritual-
istic phenomena da\\Tied, afforded as vivid and typical a case
of w'ondering with all its allied and concomitant states as could
be desired. And in the course of it all the chance peckings of
a few domesticallj'^ inoffensive and greedy brown leghorns rose
to the height of direct communications from the Unknown.
Finally, a word about the clue of fear. Fear is often found
associated with the uncertainty of doubt and with the durating
sense of strangeness that characterize a well-developed state of
marvel. It is not hard to appreciate the naturalness of this
combination when the disturbing nature of the marvellous, its
lack of adaptation, is put side by side with the element of shock
from the strange and unkno\\Ti that so often is the cause of
fear. The relations between fear and the new and unexpected
are too well known to need any elaboration here, but a caution
in the matter is to be registered. Care must be taken to avoid
confusing the fear that is associated with wonder and marvel
and the fear that goes with surprise. Sully is in danger of
offending here when he says: *'0n the other hand, wonder is
related as a disturbing shock to the emotion of fear. "^® The
word shock, as it stands in the quotation, suggests the suddenness
and unpreparedness of surprise, rather than a durating sense
of strangeness. The intense shock, and the spasm of fear fol-
lowing it, are not conducive to wonder, but are rather directly
inimical to it. Dominant fear is apt to find the motor expression
of a rapid and headlong flight more congenial than the luxury
of static wonder. No! The real role of fear in wonder is a
subordinate part, — a standing in the background to lend to the
68 Sully, op. cit., p. 523.
TEE PSYCHOLOGY OF WONBEE. 89
emotion richness and piercing vividness, or a lurking, fascinat-
ing possibility of danger. Not the shock itself, but the suspense
of insecurity, of an immediate peril, of shock impending, is
fear's contribution to wonder. And in the higher cases, where to
an object more impressive there answers a feeling of sublimity,
this contributive fear becomes awe, and promotes the religious
ecstasy of a Jacob at Bethel.
A sort of criterion of the amount of fear proper to a state
of wonder or marvel is furnished by the presence or absence
of pleasure derived from the fascination of fear. Too great
an impression of fear is signalized by pain. Indeed, the pleas-
urable characteristics of wondering are divided, probably, be-
tween the peculiar attraction of the fearful and the sublimer
gratification to be drawn from moving in the ideal freedom of the
marvellous ; though over and above these two there is to be men-
tioned, of course, that usual glamor of excitement that accom-
panies vivid activity of any mental or motor process. Certainly
these three categories cover the field of wonder-pleasure. Run-
ning through them all, a special aspect no more of one than of
another, is that sense of self-gratulation, that selt-avertisse77ient
we have already noticed in connection with the activity of the
imagination. °^ To be thrilling with hippogriffs and wishing-
mats, or with messages from the dead, or with the miracle of
the oil of St. Walburga,*'" or with the visions of Bohme, or with
the rending of the veil and opening of graves at the Passion of
Golgotha, — do not such experiences open outward the door of
these too earthly circumstances of ours and bring child or gray-
beard, pagan or Christian, upon the threshold of that richer
life, that grander power, which we all feel latent witliin us
because we seldom are what we can be, seldom live to our full
force, never realize our dreams of what we are and could be?
We are dulled by the ordinary ; the usual blunts our imagination
by making us indifferent to what we see daily: but when the
fascination of a subtle fear rouses us to nervous tension, or when
the impingement of the unusual, of the marvellous, becomes the
magic philter of a limitless freedom, do we not always feel that
59 See above, p. 86.
«o See Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, London 1902, pp. 298, 391.
90 STUDIES IN TEE MAEVELLOUS.
at last we are becoming individual, above the crushing and
demagnetizing forces of the commonplace?
The relation of fear to the fourth of the six typical cases
should be noticed. In that case, it will be remembered, rarity, or
improbability, persists, and no explanation is given : continuous
companionship with the weird beauty and strange influence of
Hawthorne 's Beatrice,^^ no explanation being vouchsafed, results
in the gradual diminution of the initial marvel. But if the marvel
— or the wonder, in the case of mere rarity being substituted for
the improbable or impossible — if the marvel be attended with a
fear that is lasting in character, this process of diminution may
be checked, or even converted into the exact opposite, — the exag-
geration of marvel. One of the best possible examples is Defoe's
picture of Crusoe's state of mind after his discovery of the
single, mysterious footprint on the sand of the lonely island.
Fear of assault at any moment kept the wonder of that footprint
vividly and continually before Crusoe's mind.
Thus, from whatever vantage we regard wonder, it reveals
itself as extending no further into human weakness and ignorance
on the one hand, than into the hopes and longings of the race
on the other. If we choose our approach from the "disadapta-
tion" of surprise, we either find the suddenness of physical
shock passing into a wonder of the lesser kind, the power of
which is gone as soon as ignorance of the cause is dissipated ; or,
where the surprise is occasioned by the unusual, and so involves a
mental discrimination, we detect a passing into a wonder of which
the power varies according to six cases when the unusuahiess is
mere rarity, or rises to the marvellous when improbability and im-
possibility are the contents of the unusual.®'^ Again, coming into
these processes, sometimes earlier, sometimes later, is curiosity, —
the attempt, peculiarly motor and teleological, at adaptation.
But, baffled, it exchanges its effort at a positive assimilation for
the best that wonder can afford, — a sort of negative accommo-
dation. But where the mind recognizes instantaneously that
61 See above, p. 72.
02 For fear of misunderstanding we must insist again that suddenness
and rarity are in the majority of cases co-existent. They are separated
only for the purpose of analysis.
TEE PSYCHOLOGT OF WONDER. 91
there is no probable or possible solution, there is present imme-
diately the acme of wonder, marvelling. Nor should the similar-
ity of these states of intenser wonder on the one hand, to those
of astonishment or amazement on the other, be the subject of
confusion; the difference, often hard to detect, lies between the
paralysis-like cessation of function in the latter, and the puzzled,
dubitative, indecisive action of the former. But with the im-
probable still another element comes to view — the necessity of
belief — which in turn opens up the realms of imagination and
ideal freedom. Fear, with its fascination and intensifying
power, brings still another facet into play, and suggests the
pleasurable aspects of wonder. With these higher reaches of
subject and stimulus, the marvellous proper, aided by the free-
dom of imagination, and supported by an idealistic belief, makes
its climactic appearance in the field of literature. The imagina-
tive and idealistic functions have always marked that field for
their own exercise; it is now clearly seen to be also the field
that preeminently and distinctively affords to the marvellous
the peculiar conditions necessary to its growth. When wonders
become too idealized for the crowd, or too unreal for the material-
ist, they still find in literature an hospitable welcome at the
hands of the innumerable company of marvels long since domi-
ciled there, and, at recurring intervals, still regnant there.
And with every changing condition the colors of human signifi-
cance vary from the duller ones that accompany the familiar cases
of every-day wonder — the brief, winged moment of sudden
stimulus and pausing ignorance — to the flash of gold and veil of
purple that envelop the ecstatic vision of seer and mystic.
This description gives us certain more or less logical methods
of differentiating the various cases of wonder, and also the
various steps which lead from common wonder to the superlative
case of the marvellous. A certain artificiality of division in our
analysis and classification cannot be helped ; nor is it possible to
declare the exact formation of wonder. These points of view
have shown us constituent elements and suggested certain broad
classes; but the very come-and-go character of them all renders
it entirely beyond our power to prescribe the exact propor-
tion in which they make up what is called wonder or marvel.
92 STUDIES IN THE MABFELLOUS.
Each case is a ease to itself, — some with more of this and less of
that ingredient ; some omitting this to the same extent that they
exaggerate that element; some involving one order of sequence
of elements, others another. The description is a striking justi-
fication of Wundt's words: "The more composite a psychical
process, the more variable will be its single concrete manifesta-
tions. ""^
Finally, to close our summary and comment, it will be noted
that a detailed description of wondering has not only resulted in
presenting for the emotion the same width and variety of field
that was found to be indicated by the popular use and definition
of the word (which was to be expected), but has also suggested,
by the marking out of a regular and natural gradation from the
simplest to the sublimest cases of wonder, the correctness of our
intuition that the histor}^ of words contains here a testimony
to the common origin psychologically of two sets of phenomena
— the rare but entirely possible on the one hand, and the pro-
digious, the hyper-physical, on the other — which have come in
the course of civilization to be regarded as not only widely
different, but also diametrically and significantly opposed in
origin."*
•Js Wundt, op. cit., p. 187.
64 See above, p. 13.
CHAPTER III.
WONDER IN PRIMITIVE MIND, CUSTOM, AND BELIEF.
What is wonderful to the primitive? — Difficulties in
answering — Subjective difficulty — Unreliability of data —
General description of primitive mind, custom, and belief
— Preliminary difficulties and objections — Vierkandt 's pic-
ture of primitive mind and belief — Points, in primitive
conditions, making against wonder: (a) no conception of
unexceptional regularity; (b) matter-of-fact character of
belief in spirits who cause rarities; (c) no impossibility
possible to primitive consciousness; (d) primitive curi-
osity not favorable to wonder; (e) primitive belief and
imagination not favorable to wonder; (f) magic as 'scien-
tific'; (g) animism — Points, in primitive conditions, making
for wonder: (a) segregated nature of gods; (6) of priest;
(c) of magician; (d) of magic as 'magical'; (e) of taboo;
(f) exaggeration — Summary.
In turning to the beginnings of wonder in primitive culture,
no difficulty need be experienced in collecting cases that to a
modern sophisticated standard of the usual and possible will seem
marvellous. Savage custom and belief are full of such. But a
difficulty of very real and almost insurmountable magnitude con-
fronts the student who w^ould know just how far these cases
appear wonderful to the savage himself. Between our judgment
and his there exists a gap as great as that between the architec-
ture of a steel-frame fireproof office building and the slight in-
flammable hogan of a Navajo. INIany a detail of his daily life,
undertaken by the savage in the torrid regions of Queensland, or
in the arctic wastes of Alaska, with the sang froid of a broker
reaching for his telephone, appears as strange to us as would the
"long-talk" of the broker's instrument to the savage. In their
customs of making rain or sunshine, and laying or raising the
wind, for instance, the members of savage society consider them-
selves endowed with powers we should regard as supernatural;^
1 See J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, 2d ed., London 1900, I, 81-128.
Cf. also Jevons, Introd. to the Hist, of Eelig., 2d ed., London 1902, p. 16.
i<4 STUDIES IN THE MAEVELLOUS.
but their ignorance of natural law and human limitation never
for a moment permits them any sense of wonder, and, to use the
words of Lewes when lie speaks of the ready acceptance by simple
minds of illusory hypotheses, ' ' marvels are not marvellous to them,
for ignorance does not marvel. ' '- It is no slight matter, therefore,
to be on guard against easily assuming that even the wildest
vagaries of primitive mind are J)0)ia fide eases of wonder from
the original point of view. The difficulty is of course a subjective
one. That is acknowledged at once.
Moreover, the savage himself is not present at the examina-
tion ; only his beliefs and customs as reported by more or less
trustworthy travelers, missionaries, and ethnologists, are in
evidence. Nor has the present writer had any greater experi-
ence with savage life than what, meagre enough, might be picked
up in several summers spent with Indians on the Navajo and
Ute reservations in southern Colorado. The sum of that experi-
ence represents but little beyond a full recognition of the constant
difficulty and error to which a foreigner's observation of savage
traits is liable because of the stubborn reticence or crafty sub-
terfuge of the native. The amount of absolutely false evidence
submitted by zealous but unskilled travelers or prejudiced mis-
sionaries, is a byword of every ethnological treatise. Truly,
betw'een the subjective nature of the problem and the drawbacks
of untrustworthy evidence, the difficulty seems almost invincible.
This second difficulty will be met in due time by a careful
selection of examples from books by professed and fully trained
ethnologists. Within the last ten years there has been, for-
tunately, a great increase in such material. But an attempt has
also been made to pave a way out of the first vexation. The prin-
ciples established in the previous chapter are in part the required
solution. There the description of wondering as we ourselves
experience it puts into our hands a very real standard to aid us
in the subjective puzzle. Thus, in view of that standard, we must
now note and emphasize the fact that the control of sun and rain,
to take the same illustration, appears no unusual power to our
savage ; it involves nothing of inexplicable suddenness, nothing
of mysterious rarity, nothing of impossibility. It is, on the con-
2 G. H. Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, 3d eel., Loinlon 1874, I, 337.
WONDER IN PRIMITIVE MIND, CUSTOM, AND BELIEF. 95
trary, a usual occurrence, a custom, the habit of each individual.
Therefore, no sense of the marvellous is present to the performer.
Again, any Bushman hunter who finds himself returning to camp
late in the afternoon puts a lump of earth in the crotch of a tree
to retard the sun's decline.^ There is here, say those who have
observed such acts, no sense of performing a wonderful deed;
but our own examination into the processes of wondering would
have told us that immediately. The testimony of the observer is
only corroboration, — proof of the correctness of our principle.
Of course the application of the principles here, rests upon a
hidden premise, but one that requires bare mention in order to win
immediate acquiescence, — the premise that the primitive mind
works in the same fashion as the civilized mind. It is easy to cite
agreement with this obvious fact. Professor Tylor writes: "If
any one holds that human thought and action were worked out in
primaeval times according to laws essentially other than those of
the modern world, it is for him to prove by valid evidence this
anomalous state of things, otherwise the doctrine of permanent
principle will hold good, as in astronomy or geology."* Pro-
fessor Brinton devotes several pages to the matter, speaks of the
"cardinal and basic truth of the unity of action of man's
intelligence, ' '^ and is at pains to cite Granger,*' Post,^ Hartland,^
Buchmann,^ Honegger,^'^ and Bastian,^^ to the same effect.
Spencer goes into the matter at length in his Principles of
Sociology;^- and Principal Jevons treats of it most conscien-
tiously.^^
With this almost axiomatic truth once granted, there can be
no objection to applying our general principles of wonder to
3 E. M. Curr, llie Australian Race, I, 50.
4 E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 4th ed., London 1903, I, 33.
5 D. G. Brinton, Religions of Primitive Peoples, New York 1899, pp.
6-10.
6 Granger, The Worship of the Romans, p. vii.
"^ A. H. Post, Grundriss der ethnologischen Jurisprudens, Bd. i, s. 4.
8 S. Hartland, The Science of Fairy Tales, p. 2.
9 Buchmann, Zeitschrift fiir Vblkerpsychologie, Bd. xi, s. 124.
10 J. J. Honegger, Allgemeine Culturgeschichte, Bd. 1, s. 332.
11 Bastian, Grundsiige der Ethnologic, s. 73.
12 H. Spencer, Principles of Sociology, § 52.
13 Jevons, op. cit., Chap. TV.
96 STUDIES IN THE MAEVELLOUS.
primitive culture. Ignorance, indeed, to recur to Lewes' phrase,
cannot marvel at what is not known to be unusual or impossible;
but ignorance is a relative matter, and as soon as there is any
mental development there arises per se the possibility of wonder.
In order, however, to apply our principles, we must know some-
thing of the general character of the primitive mind, of its ap-
proximate stage of knowledge and mental complexity ; something
of its general attitude toward its environment as expressed in
customs and beliefs. Otherwise, the usual could not be separated
from the unusual; nor could we determine at what point in
early consciousness the impossible takes its rise. It is proposed,
therefore, to preface the account of actual cases of primitive
wonder by a brief, general survey of the mental and emotional
characteristics, and most important traits of custom and belief,
that are universally found to distinguish primitive society. Such
a task might appear one of supererogation in view of all that has
been said upon this fascinating subject by Tylor, Lang, Spencer,
Frazer, and a multitude of others both at home and abroad, were
it not such an important step in the present line of argument.
Moreover, in summarizing the observations of the ethnologists
and folk-psychologists upon these general points, it will be pos-
sible to focus all the material upon the one particular point of
our inquiry; and thus, when we are ready to touch upon the
actual cases of wonder, there will be present not only a body of
general knowledge about customs and beliefs, to give us a standard
for separating the usual from the unusual, but also a certain
familiarity with the possible extent and chief directions of the
wondering activity in the savage's mind. Our a posteriori stand-
ard will be supplemented by the possibility of a priori reasoning.
At the outset of such a survey, one general objection, with
several aspects, becoming more and more serious of late, must be
engaged. Perhaps the learned have created a new mythological
hero, and named him Primitive ]\Ian ! Let us, therefore, they say,
confine ourselves to savage and barbaric men, to actual cases, and
leave generalization aside ! Who ever, it is objected, saw a primi-
tive man ? What is this primitive that you all talk about ? Where
is he, or when did he live?" "Primitive," answers Professor
Brinton, "to the ethnologist means the earliest of a given race or
WONDER IN PEIMITIVE MIND, CUSTOM, AND BELIEF. 97
tribe of whom he has trusty information. It has reference to a
stage of culture, rather than to time. ' '" Again, Professor Dewey
very wisely voices a further objection against that ethnological
method which throws together under a single classification data
drawn from societies in widely differing stages of development.^^
Finally, it must alwaj^s be remembered that "specialized as they
are in correspondence wath our thoughts, our words do not rep-
resent truly the thoughts of the savage; and often entirely mis-
represent them."^'' Indeed, the whole difficulty of presenting a
general picture of primitive cultural conditions may be compared
with the attempts of moderns to epitomize the natural character-
istics of their own or of a foreign people. Bryce's American
Commonwealth, the efforts of Dickens, Arnold, or JNIax 'Rell at
national and racial portraiture, or the famous essay of Renan
upon the Semites, afford familiar examples of the mingled success
wholly unknown to the early savage, or else, in their equivalents,
and shortcomings of such work. How much more open to mistake
is the subject of primitive life, — with its distance, though it may
be less complex ; with the danger of too great generalization from
data of unlike strata, though the difference may be less than
between modern strata ; with the perpetual difficulty of apprecia-
tion and expression due to the fact that our very words are either
quite differently understood by him ! In spite of all these objec-
tions, however, the actual observations of tribes here and hordes
there are seen upon a careful scrutiny plainly to reveal certain
great tendencies; and these tendencies of character and custom
may be combined to present a sort of composite of so-called primi-
tive culture. Not any one actual, individual case, but the pre-
dominating tendency of a multitude of cases toward this or that
character or custom, is all that a self-conscious history or descrip-
tion of peoples can hope to give. There were romantic spirits
in the days of Pope and Swift, of Addison and Dryden — plenty of
them ; but the predominating tendency was nevertheless toward
an artificial classicism : there are keen, refiective, reasoning minds
among the Botocudo or even the Veddahs ; but the predominating
14 Op. cit., p. 11.
15 Dewey, J., Interpretation of Savage Mind (Psychological 'Review,
Vol. IX, No. 3, p. 217, May, 1902).
16 Spencer, Op. cit., § 116.
98 STUDIES IN THE MAEVELLOVS.
mental tendency is one of sluggishness and stupidity. It is these
tendencies, then, let it be repeated, that are here combined to form
a typical picture of savage life.
Vierkandt" has summarized the attempts made by Remusat,
Gustav d'Eichthal, Karl von den Steinen, Klemms, Lippert,
Peschel, Bagehot, Ratzel, and Spencer to differentiate Kultur-
volker and Naturvdlker. His own account of the mythological
mode of thinking has been rendered in the following brief : "Sub-
jectively considered, the presence of contradictions is to be noted,
although there is a sort of logical coherence if certain peculiar
premises are granted. The primary difference between this
degree of thinking and the scientific lies, then, in a difference
of premises, which is found negatively in the absence of the con-
ception of unexceptional regularity, positively in the belief in
spiritual beings whose actions cannot be predicted by calcula-
tion and whose motives are whimsical. From the narrowness of
consciousness and the overwhelming power of the mechanism of
association it follows : (a) that consciousness abides by that which
is perceived by the senses. There is a lack of power to under-
stand anything at all abstract, hence all 'becoming,' which is
more abstract than objects. Thus, also, it is impossible to con-
ceive of 'spirit' aside from an objective entity. (6) That every-
where there is a joining of thoughts according to purely external
association. Consequently there is lacking a proper causal con-
ception, which has its starting point in the conformity of all
phenomena to law. Objectively, the following points are to be
emphasized: (a) propensity to personification; (6) the spiritual
as material; (c) processes are transformed into objects, and then
often personified, as sickness, disease, etc. ; (d) the cause of a
thing is never sought inside itself, but always externally, as
death; (e) there is no becoming and growing from within, but
only an external origin — "once upon a time" — no continuity,
but intermittent activity; (/) the whole has the properties of the
parts, and vice versa; (g) similar things have similar properties;
(h) things that originally went together, but were later sep-
arated, are still regarded as a connected whole. The entire
17 Vicrkandt, A., Naturvolkcr und Kulturvulkcr, Leipzig 1896, p. 1 ff.
WONDEB IN PRIMITIVE MIND, CUSTOM, AND BELIEF. 99
method of thought clearly rests upon the basis of mere objective
perception, — the world consisting of a collection of bodily things,
each body an independent being and homogeneous whole, with
unchangeable characteristics, but with the power of divisibility.
So there is no idea of inner causation or gradual evolution, but
only of personal causation, and the metamorphosis of one body
into another. "^^
We may now pause before this picture of tendencies for the
purpose of comment and interpretation in behalf of wonder. It
should be noted, first of all, that primitive thought is not made too
simple. Our search for literary beginnings does not involve a
genetic study of mind; it carries us back only to a stage of
consciousness that is, relatively speaking, highly developed, — as
high in the scale of consciousness, perhaps, as the human species
is in the organic scale. And the long line of evolution before that
stage, the long line of progenitors of our articulate, verse-making,
ritual-dancing savage, gives indeed to the stage we are consider-
ing a de facto jejune and conservative condition of affairs and
customs, and, therefore, of ideas. The tyrannical force of complex
customs in totem, marriage, and religious ceremonies is a matter
of too common remark to require illustration here. In fact, as
Professor Baldwin says, * ' the relative force of convention, slavish
imitation, worship of custom, seems to have some relation to the
degree of development of a people. "^^ Primitive belief and
literature are not a sort of sudden, pre-historic Elizabethan
efflorescence ; they are the outgrowth of an immemorial past, of a
development slow, monotonous, laborious, and uninspired, — do
not rise unannounced in an age of great leavening and mental
freedom, but make their gradual appearance in the midst of con-
servatism, custom, and cast-iron habit. Primitive mind is not
synonymous with a world-freshness, with a dawning inspiration
and spontaneity of invention. The Weltanschauung of a people
in that stage is far more fixed by time and custom than the
religious belief of a New England Puritan. There is not that
division of labor and specialization of production that in more
IS For this summary I am indebted to an unpublished article by Pro-
fessor Max Margolis. For the original, see Vierkandt, op. cit., pp. 252-2.'38.
10 Baldwin, op. cit., p. 354.
100 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS.
advanced coniinuuities produce a mental variety to match the
economic differentiation. All the conditions of their life tend
toward quiesence and uniformity. There is no rapid transit
and no knowledge of various climates and continents, customs
and peoples, to stir the savage mind ; no " European event ' ' — no
crusades — to begin a new life of state and thought. And yet, in
spite of all this, we of a self-conscious, critical, introspective age,
in looking back at the productions and characteristics of an
early era of culture, experience at the sight a sensation of novelty,
simplicity, spontaneity, invention : the things of that age are all
so far removed from the sophistication of the present! The
contrast is strongly evident to our imagination. But we then
proceed to attribute to that primitive age as its ovra character-
istics the very sensations we have experienced in contemplating
it. This is as fallacious and unscientific as it is subjective.
Primitive simplicity is not nearly so simple as we would have it ;
nor primitive belief so free, or primitive spontaneity so spon-
taneous, as they seem.
In all the activities that have to do with totemic ceremonies,
totemic legends, marriage and initiation and intichiutna rites,
churinga, magic, fetish- worship, and the like, we have the wit-
nesses of a mental reaction upon the external world that is dis-
tinctly over and above the mere physical demands for food and
drink and shelter. Moreover, these activities, especially in their
sacred and secret aspects, occupy an extremely large and serious
position in primitive life.-" We are not to pre-suppose, then, for
purposes of wonder, a total lack of phronemic development, or
even a very great lack. Centers of complex association and
inference, of memory-store with a strongly habituated action (for
all these rites are, as we have said, matters of cast-iron custom),
are to be granted.
The gap between the modern and the savage intellect lies
supremely in what Vierkandt calls the premises. There is no
conception of unexceptional regularity, says Vierkandt. That
there is no conscious concept I am disposed to agree; but that
there is no perception of irregularity in experience is quite
2" Cf. Spencer and Gillcn, Northern Tribes of Central Australia, New
York 1904, pp. 3.3, 34, 249 flp.
WONDER IN PRIMITIVE MIND, CUSTOM, AND BELIEF. 101
another thing. Unexceptional regularity in the action of the
laws of nature is something that all civilized peoples are as yet
by no means ready to grant; and savant as well as tyro often
finds himself marvelling : but exceptions in experience — rarities,
unusual happenings and forms — are as frequently present to
the savage as to the citizen, — perhaps far more so. That
these latter upon approaching the centers of stored experience
will produce surprise, is a statement that needs no extended
proof; for we have already noticed the simple and primitive
character of surprise. If beasts, creatures lower in the organic
scale than man, experience surprise at an interruption of their
habitual reactions, it follows necessarily that primitive man is
capable of the same feeling. The assumed stoicism of indifference
to surprise with which the savage wraps himself is entirely another
affair (as is also the rational surprise mentioned by Spencer)-^
and is a sign in itself that his psychic life is subject to very high
and complex experiences of surprise. The real question is
whether his surprise can pass into wonder. All the conditions
are present, — the developed mental center and the reporting
facilities. Is there in the make-up of the savage anything to
prevent the natural progress to wonder?
There are facts of a character to prevent that progress. In
the first place, wonder as a well-established state involves, as we
have seen, a certain duration of attention. It is notorious that
the mind of the savage, like that of the child, is distinguished
by a reluctance to fix its attention for any protracted period upon
any single problem that is not immediately and concretely con-
nected with food-supply or some other equally urgent necessity.^-
The ease with which the attention of a child or a savage can be
diverted, the positive pain attending the attempt at severe mental
application, are matters not so remote from our own adult ex-
perience that we can fail to appreciate their naturalness in the
mind untrained by long, assiduous application. Spencer presents
the evidence thus :
"A passage which Sir John Lubbock quotes from Mr. Sproat's account
of the Ahts may be taken as descriptive of the average state: 'The native
mind, to an educated man, seems generally to be asleep. ... On his
21 Spencer, op. cit., § 45.
22 Cf. Vierkandt, op. cit., p. 259.
102 STUDIES IN TEE MAEVELLOVS.
attention being fully aroused, he often shows much quickness in reply and
ingenuity in argument. But a short conversation wearies him, particularly if
questions are asked that require efforts of thought or memory on his part.
The mind of the savage then appears to rock to and fro out of mere weak-
ness.' Spix and Martins tell us of the Brazilian Indians that 'scarcely has
one begun to question him about his language, when he grows impatient,
complains of headache, and shows that he is unable to bear the exertion';
and according to Mr. Bates, ' it is difficult to get at their notions on subjects
that require a little abstract thought. ' When the Abipones ' are unable to
comprehend anything at first sight, they soon grow weary of examining it,
and cry — What is it after all?' It is the same with Negroes. Burton says
of the East Africans, ' ten minutes sufficed to weary out the most intellectual, '
when questioned about their system of numbers. And even of so com-
paratively superior a race as the Malagasy, it is remarked that they ' do not
seem to possess the qualities of mind requisite for close and continued
thought.' "23
In the second place, the other premise mentioned by Vier-
kandt interferes to change the processes of wondering as we are
familiar with them. The "belief in the influence of spiritual
beings whose actions cannot be predicted by calculation and
whose motives are whimsical,"^* causes a further interruption
of the progress to wonder. What happens objectively is this:
the rarity is immediately explained by reference to personal,
spiritual causation. "What takes place subjectively is the im-
mediate association of the rarity with the second premise. The
process, moreover, is perfectly logical : spirits produce all strange
things; this is a strange thing; the spirits have produced it.
The explanation is complete. The rarity, however, still exists;
but it is assimilated to a great class of rarities — those that are
the insignia of spiritual presences — and therefore any slight sense
of wonder that might have crept in is doomed to speedy extinc-
tion. The experience thus resolves itself into the second of the
six cases of rarity and explanation f^ and the result here is only
more precipitate than that already predicted, — a fading vivid-
ness of wonder. Moreover, the belief in these spiritual influences,
if it is so great as to amount to a universal premise, is of that
full and perfect nature which is hardly consonant with wonder.^"
Spirits, to such belief, are matters of fact; and their doings, also,
23 Spencer, op. cit., § 43.
2< See above, p. 98.
25 See above, p. 63.
26 See above, pp. 79-80.
WONDER IN PBIMITIFE MIND, CUSTOM, AND BELIEF. 103
are matters of fact, which, while easily provocative of surprise,
even of astonishment, are scarcely conducive to wonder, even if
the savage's powers be equal to the concentration of attention
necessary to it. Unless some other tendency intervenes there
seems here but small chance of wondering.
Still less opportunity for marvelling ! For if there is no con-
ception of unexceptional regularity, and the belief in spiritual
powers is so absolute as to render them matters of fact, primitive
consciousness can conceive of nothing as impossible. Consequently,
the apotheosis of wonder, the marvellous, which rests upon a
belief in the impossible, is not to be expected within the realm
of early psychic experiences. Nor will a more careful regard of
the nature of the conception of unexceptional regularity bring
any more encouraging results. It might be remarked, for in-
stance, that this conception is a splendid example of the abstrac-
tion that is formed from the wearing down of a multiplicity of
concrete experiences, of that "true abstraction" that is "not a
singling out ; it is rather a paring down, a wearing off, an erosion,
due to the progress in adjustment which the organ has been able
to effect. "^^ Now, it might be continued, although the abstract
conception of regularity may not yet be formed, still, among the
concrete experiences that are on their way to a reduction to
such an abstraction, there must be acted out physically again
and again experiences that are tending in a contrary direction
because they are interruptions of regularity; and the opposition
between these interruptions and ordinary experiences must be
felt, if not conceived, as irregular and impossible. For instance,
a man who can do something no other man can do, or any
other similar anomaly in an order of experience established
by every-day motor and sensory activity, must be felt at once
as far transcending in power what the individual percipient
and his fellows can do or are in the habit of experiencing.-*
From such, it would be maintained, an incipient sense of the
27 Baldwin, op. cit., p. 328.
28 Cf. Jevons on the surprise resulting from the interruption of expecta-
tion or "the belief that what has once happened will in similar circumstances
happen again" (op. cit., pp. 17 ff.). The norm of experiental regularity
in the life of the primitive is thus contrasted with the animistic norm:
"In their higher generalizations, in what Powell calls their 'sophiology, '
it appears that the primitive peoples are guided by animistic norms; they
104 STUDIES IN THE MABVELLOUS.
marvellous might be expected. But, though the observations
are undoubtedly correct, the inference is erroneous. Once
given such a case of irregular experience, it is open immediately
to the operations of spiritual explanation and loss of wonder
just traced in the two previous paragraphs ; what seemed to be
a new condition resolves itself at once into the former case.
Equally futile, then, with that of wonder, is the quest of the
marvellous in primitive mind, unless, as was stipulated before,
some other tendency intervenes to modify the operation of the
tendencies here represented as premises.
In order better to check the results so far established it will
be wise to examine the testimony as to the general trend of
curiosity, belief, and imagination among the ruder peoples. About
curiosity there has been a difference of opinion among authors.
Spencer,-^ while admitting the presence of strong curiosity
among the higher Polynesians, maintains that the lowest mental
state is characterized by "an absence of desire for information
make up their cosmological schemes, and the like, in terms of personal or
quasi-personal activity, and the whole is thrown into something of a dram-
atic form. Through the early cosmological lore runs a dramatic consist-
ency which imputes something in the way of initiative and propensity to
the phenomena that are to be accounted for. But this dramatization of
the facts, the accounting for phenomena in terms of spiritual or quasi-
spiritual initiative, is by no means the whole case of primitive men 's
systematic knowledge of facts. Their theories are not all of the nature
of dramatic legend, myth, or animistic life-history, although the broader
and more picturesque generalizations may take that form. There always
runs along by the side of these dramaturgic life-histories, and underlying
them, an obscure system of generalizations in terms of matter-of-fact.
The system of matter-of-fact generalizations, or theories, is obscurer than
the dramatic generalizations only in the sense that it is left in the back-
ground as being less picturesque and of less vital interest, not in the sense
of being less familiar, less adequately apprehended, or less secure. The
peoples of the lower cultures ' know ' that the broad scheme of things is
to be explained in terms of creation, perhaps of procreation, gestation, birth,
growth, life and initiative; and these matters engross the attention and
stimulate speculation. But they know equally well the matter of fact that
water will run down hill, that two stones are heavier than one of them,
that an edge-tool will cut softer substances, that two things may be tied
together with a string, that a pointed stick may be stuck in the ground,
and the like. There is no range of knowledge that is held more securely
by any people than such matters of fact; and these are generalizations
from experience ; they are theoretical knowledge, and they are a matter
of course. They underlie the dramatical generalizations of the broad
scheme of things, and are so employed in the speculations of the myth-
makers and the learned. ' ' — Veblen, T., ' ' The Evolution of the Scientific
Point of View, ' ' in The University of California Chronicle, Vol. X, No. 4,
pp. 403-404 (Oct., 1908).
2» Spencer, Op. cit., § 46.
WONDER IN PEIMITIVE MIND, CUSTOM, AND BELIEF. 105
about new things." Dr. Lang^^ will not admit that even the
lower races are at fault in this respect, and proceeds to demolish
Spencer's evidence. He further claims that mythology is the
result of the inquisitive turn of mind which universally belongs
to savage races. Professor Giddings comes at the question com-
paratively, from the point of view of the analogy supposed to
exist between the minds of children and savages, and, discover-
ing a relation between the child's curiosity and his naming
activity, would by analogy throw curiosity as far back as the
practice by primitive man of ' ' his newly acquired and wonderful
faculty of speech. ' '^^ The wide variety of opinion indicated by
these three references might perhaps have been avoided if the
term curiosity had been carefully defined in its application to
those degrees of intelligence that are lower than those amongst
which the term is common. Here, as in the early stages of the
development of every body of knowledge, much confusion arises
through the use, where exact information is to be conveyed, of
popular and loosely defined phrases. If by curiosity there is
meant the mere attempt at closer, sensuous familiarity with a
novel object, the tentative rubbing and mouthing and fingering
of the strange thing, it will be immediately admitted that such
curiosity is to be attributed not only to savages, but also, and
most indubitably, to the lower animals. The craning necks
of fowls, the advancing and retreating movements of domestic
or wild animals, are too familiar to allow of any disagreement
here. It is to this class of activities that we have already seen
Professor James referring in these words : ' ' Some such suscepti-
bility for being excited ... by the mere novelty, as such, of
any movable feature of the environment must form the instinctive
basis of all human curiosity. ' '^^ Nor is this desire sensuously to
experience the new object a matter that ends with the develop-
ment of a rational curiosity. The Sandwich Islanders examining
Cook's European equipments, exploring and stroking them, are
to be compared to a civilized being involuntarily fingering things
new to his experience. Whether or not there is in connection with
30 Lang, A., Myth, Eitual and Bcligion, London 1899, I, 86 fif.
31 Giddings, F. H., The Principles of Sociology, New York 1896, p. 227.
32 James, W., op. cit., II, 429.
106 STUDIES IN THE MABVELLOUS.
this instinctive curiosity a state of blank suspense that might be
called the physiological analogue of wonder, is, however, a matter
with which we are not concerned. As already remarked, the
genetic study of these matters is distinctly outside the present
province of early mind ; while wonder as it has been described in
the last chapter is, so far as we are concerned, a matter dis-
tinctly dependent upon that long circuit of reaction that brings
into play the cerebral and rational functions.
If, on the other hand, there is meant by curiosity a definite,
reflective, ratiocinative progress, by which the novel object or
experience is made to go through the gamut of analysis and
comparison in order to be assigned to its proper place in the
mental classification of phenomena, the task of answering 3'ea or
nay to the question of savage curiosity is more complicated,
though by no means doubtful. The degree of reflection present
in the individual is indeed the key to the whole mental difference
between the uncivilized and civilized races ; nor is there, perhaps,
any way in which this can better be realized than by contrasting
the environments into which the children of the respective races
are born. A child of modern civilization is not only born into a
world of a highly developed language, which is freighted with
the reflection of centuries, and to which he immediately falls
heir, but he also grows up in the midst of a world of thought-
monuments, — of houses, fences, walks, roads, of steam-cars, news-
papers, telegraph-poles, and books, of innumerable other embodied
human thoughts, which take the place in his life that in the life
of the savage's infant is occupied by the natural wilds of forest
and plain, mountain and river. Churches and other institutions
convey early to one mind a sense of the past ; family records and
histories of nations create him a miniature citizen long before the
age of maturity; religious instruction makes a priest of him with
eyes toward the future while still at his mother's knees; geo-
graphies make of him a cosmopolitan before he travels beyond his
own village : to the other mind all these monuments and encour-
agements to reflection are present only in a degree so low as to
appear abortive by comparison ; while the wilds and dangers, the
great, sheer, physical struggle with beast and tempest, the con-
tinual search, nomad-wise, for food and shelter, dominate his
I
WONDER IN PEIMITIVE MIND, CUSTOM, AND BELIEF. 107
wandering, precarious initiation into life.^'' But the beginnings
of religion and history and government, of church, college, and
state, are there, — in the tools and shelters of the stone-age, in the
initiation ceremonies of the Australians, in their complex tribal
and inter-tribal relationships, in their tales and mythologies.
The contrast is tremendous; but there is something to contrast.
Finally, corresponding to those rude beginnings, there is a rough
mental classification of phenomena ; and thus there is present the
machinery for a reflection as crude mentally as the horde, or
wigwam, or celt, is crude economically. Calculated only for daily
needs are the implements of savage life ; and corresponding only
to daily activities is the reflection evidenced by peoples of the
stone-age in culture. Spencer and Gillen say of the Central Aus-
tralians : ' ' their mental powers are simply developed along the
lines which are of service to them in their daily life. ' '^* For per-
forming their sacred ceremonies they can give no clear reason :
"the natives have no very definite idea in regard to this, merely
saying that it pleases the Wollunqua when they are performed
and displeases him when they are not, ' '^^
A reflection as crude as this can hardly give rise to a rational,
deliberative curiosity ; and, indeed, upon turning to the testimonies
of early travels, it is found that the curiosity evinced by the
aborigines is uniformly lacking in the reflective quality. The
experience of rarities and novelties is provocative of astonish-
ment, or of the mere sensuous exploration of the novel object, as
mentioned above. Cook tells of the surprise with which a New
Zealand chief viewed the European's vessel, and of how impos-
sible it was to fix his attention upon any object for a single
moment ; of the astonishment of the Matavians at seeing men on
horseback ; of the more than usual astonishment of the Sandwich
Islanders upon coming aboard.^" But the astonishment seems to
have worn away without any access of reflection. Fifty years
later Wilkes found among the same peoples, who had in the
'•i^Cf. Letourneau, La Psychologie Ethniqiie, Paris 1901, p. 79.
34 Spencer and Gillen, Northern Tribes of Central Australia, p. 30; cf.,
by same authors, Native Tribes of Central Australia, p. 46 ff.
35 Spencer and Gillen, Northern Tribes, etc., p. 227.
36 Kippis, A., Narrative of the Voyages Performed by Capt. Cool-, New
York 1858, pp. 173, 320, 337,
108 STUDIES IN THE MAEVELLOUS.
meantime come under the tutelage of the missionaries, a curiosity
equally idle and in hardly any greater degree passing beyond the
stupid stare of astonishment." Of the equally simple inquisitive-
ness of the Dyaks a good illustration may be found in H. Ling
Roth's account of the natives of Sarawak and Borneo.''® At other
times there appears a complete absence of curiosity of any kind ;^^
so that the curious state of mind seems not only as idle and
empty of reflection, but also as capricious, as with children.
On the other hand, the presence of teleological myths is
usually taken as an indication of a reflective curiosity working
upon its environment ; and Dr. Lang bases his whole account of
mythology upon the assumption of an early curiousness about the
world. Tylor speaks of the savage's intellectual appetite and
craving for reasons 'why. '^° But readiness to ask questions does
not mean a reflective and discriminating curiosity, even Avhen the
questions are about the origin and nature of the individual's
environment. The savage's curiosity, like that of the child, is
satisfied with the first answer that comes to hand, as Dr. Lang
is at pains to point out;*^ and that answ^er is the answer of
imagination. Here, indeed, a fact most important to the under-
standing of the primitive mind and its products becomes evident.
When such a mind confronts a question of rarity, its reflection is
identical with its imagination. A creative activity of mind, rather
than a critical examination, is what constitutes primitive reflec-
tion, and makes of primitive science a realm of fairy-stories that
contain the naive and facile answering of the questions asked by a
simple curiosity. Finally, it may be suggested that the inherent
delight in the exercise of this free function of invention, that the
universal love of story-telling, is quite as much at the basis of
mythology as that tendency to ask questions about everything
which is so often mistaken for a self-conscious and deliberative
activity.
37 Wilkes, C, U. 8. Exploring Expedition, Philadelphia 1845, II, 8, 111,
127.
88 H. Ling Roth, The Natives of Sarnicolc and North Borneo, London
1896, I, 68.
39 Earl. G. W., Papuans, London 18.53, p. 46; Kippis, op. cit., pp. 35, 82,
95, 325; Cf. H. Ling Roth, The Aborigines of Tasmania, Halifax 1899, p. 42,
40 Tylor, op. cit., I, 368, 369.
■•1 Lang, op. cit., I, 51.
WONDER IN PRIMITIVE MIND, CUSTOM, AND BELIEF. 109
Thus, on the one hand, whatever there is of curiosity, simple,
idle, capricious, and empty of nwy appreciable reflection (except,
of course, in matters connected with the chase, where the savage 's
complete experience is always in the process of wearing down to
ideas and reflection), is closely bound up with that stupid aston-
ishment which, as we have seen, it is always difficult to distinguish
from real wonder, and which is, at any rate, of little or no
importance in our study, save as a frequent associate of wonder.
On the other hand, the same curiosity, brought to bear upon the
striking effects of natural environment, passes off into an imagina-
tive activity which, so far as the deliberation and bafflement
of reflection that make for wonder are concerned, promises no
eventuation in that emotion.
Once more, then, the progress to wonder, this time from
curiosity, is retarded by the absence of a sophisticated classifica-
tion of phenomena under a conscious conception of natural law
and order. But if a reflection rich in the store of analysis and
synthesis of data is absent, has not imagination, it may be asked,
lent another opportunity for wonder, aside from that which comes
from curiosity working upon objective material ? Has not a new
wonder been born, even a marvel, the marvel of imagination
working upon the unrealities of the mind's eye to produce that
which has never been seen on land or sea?
This question introduces the matter of belief. Belief, because,
perhaps, of its perduring primitiveness, shows better than almost
any other mental trait the identity of processes in the minds
of savage and citizen. Dr. Lang has assisted in exploding a
fallacy long connected with the popular opinion of primitive
character. To Europeans, he remarks, the mind of the savage
and credulity have appeared almost synonymous, while in fact
it is easy to show that incredulity is a marked characteristic of
savages. Tales of Creation and the Fall brought them by the
missionaries are received often with utter disbelief, as preposter-
ous, and worthy only of ridicule.**- Everything depends upon
the authority under which the matter for credence is presented.
Let the tradition of his own people present him with the absurdest
42 Lang, op. cit., I, 92-93.
110 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS.
foolery,*^ or let those accredited with authority in the subject
demand his confidence in wildest vagaries, and the implicit assent
of the savage is immediately forthcoming. He is then the
apotheosis of credulity.''* On the other hand, the \evy narrowness
and irrationality of his faith under familiar authority render
him equally and unreasonably impervious to contrary ideas when
presented without such authority. That the early missionaries
often achieved their ends is no proof to the contrary ; but that this
furnishes, rather, a case in point, may be seen if time is taken to
reflect that the authority of these white strangers with new and
terrible magical powers of slaying and traveling was indeed so
high as to be god-like. The only wonder is that they ever failed.
Incredulity must have been unfortunately only too strong for
many an early devoted soul. The whole affair is in every way
identical with the mingling of bigotry and utter credulity which
is found among the unlearned to-day, and which would be a
paradox were it not so clearly an inevitable combination.
In belief proper, distinguished from unreflective credulity
by its interplay with doubt and conviction, the same general
principles of authority tend to hold so long as the individual
mind is absorbed in the communal. Moreover, progress in think-
ing for himself is provocative of hardly any other assured tend-
ency in the savage, because, as we have just pointed out, reflec-
tion and imagination in the savage are one and the same. Nor is
this imagination of a kind to widen the field of perceived differ-
ences, or open up the sense of various possibilities. It is not
the active imagination of a sophisticated mind indulging in con-
structive discovery and analytical invention, but, as Vierkandt
suggests, the principle of association dominating without chal-
lenge or hindrance the affairs of a narrow, uncritical conscious-
ness. Presentation in thought becomes equivalent to external
reality; and sequence in images, whether by contiguity or simi-
larity, is absolutely accepted as cause and effect. Thus, like
influences like; and antecedence in time is the same as efficient
cause.*"' There is no freedom of rare similarities and impossible
43 < < What the tribe believes, he believes, no matter what his senses tell
him. ' ' Brinton, Religions of Primitive Peoples, p. 13.
** See, e.g., Spencer and Gillen, Northern Tribes, etc., p. 484, note 1.
■«5 For example, see Frazer, op. cit., I, pp. 9ff; 49 ff; and below, p. 114.
WONDEB IN PRIMITIVE MIND, CUSTOM, AND BELIEF. Ill
contiguities, such as constitute the imagination of a modern poet,
but an even and sluggish flow of habitual associations won
directly from objective experience. What Tylor has to say about
the similarity of a savage's fancy to that of a raving lunatic*^
applies rather to the error of the imagination and absoluteness of
the delusion than to any characteristic of high and sensitive
plasticity ; to the implicitness of belief, in a word, rather than to
the spontaneity of invention. To be sure, the higher races, some
branches of the Polynesians in particular,*^ evince an astounding
freedom of poetic image; but the lower peoples are quite as
innocent of such powers as they are unconscious of their own
lesser faculties.*^ Imagination is not imagination to them; it is
fact. "There is no organized experience to produce hesitation.
There is no doubt taking the shape — 'This cannot be,' or — 'that
is impossible.' Consequently, a fancy once having got posses-
sion, retains possession, and becomes an accepted fact. If we
always carry with us the remembrance of this attitude of mind,
we shall see how apparently reasonable to savages are explana-
tions of things which they make."'*® Or, to use Tylor 's words:
"Beholding the reflexion of his own mind like a child looking at
itself in a glass, he humbly receives the teaching of his second
self."^"
4c Tylor, op. cit., I, 315.
47 Cf. Frazer, op. cit., I, 140.
48 The learned show more than usual uniformity of testimony in this
matter. Jevons {Introd. to the Hist, of Selig., Lon. 1902, p. 36) refers
to the singularly sterile imagination of the savage. Tylor {op. cit., II,
108) shows that spirits are personified causes, and not creatures of un-
bridled fancy. Tarde (TJie Laws of Imitation, New York 1903, p. 95)
speaks of "a feeble, wayward imagination scattered here and there in
the midst of a vast passive imitativeness, " and quotes Sumner Maine's
reference to Taylor to the same effect. Grosse (Beginnings of Art, New
York 1897, p. 158) says: "Some historians of culture have ascribed to prim-
itive man an excess of fancy. If he really possesses anything of the kind,
it is doubly remarkable that he never exhibits even a trace of it in the
productions of his representative art." Spencer {op. cit., I, §§39, 47, and
I, App. B., § 11) claims that primitive imagination is rominiseont, not con-
structive. Hirn {Origins of Art, Lon. 1900, pp. 168, 297) would do away
with the ' ' idea of a rich and creative imagination in primitive man, ' ' and
notices instead his deficient powers of observ^ation.
49 Spencer, op. cit., I, App. A.
50 Tylor, op. cit., II, 49. The savage's implicit trust in his own imaginings
is well illustrated by that habit of mind in a child which is called "make-
believe." It is easy to remember how real those fancies were in our
own childhood; how the mind "saw" the things happen, while external
reality was totally forgotten. The savage has comparatively little of that
112 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS.
For belief, then, whether iu liis own iniajjcinings or in new
presentations, everything depends upon the mental complexity of
the individual, — the number of categories of experience that the
subject for credence must satisfy. The less the number of such
categories, the greater the rigidity of belief. That there is a
mental complexity in the individuals we are dealing with, has
already emphatically been stated. In view of that development,
there cannot be on the part of the savage a mere blind acceptance
of whatever is presented to his consciousness, of anything and
everything claiming his attention. Far from that ; and yet, when
w'e speak comparatively, his intellectual capacity is after all a
very small matter; and as such it gives evidence of itself in a
rigidity of belief that is far from a negligible quantity in the
present research. On the contrary, this rigidity is of extreme
importance, as may be seen upon realizing its force and extent in
actual primitive life. So implicit among the aborigines of Vic-
toria is the belief in the powers of magical incantation that ' ' men
and women, who learned that it had been directed against them,
have been known to pine away and die of fright. '"^^ In New
Zealand the belief in the fatal power of tapu is so great as to
kill by mere suggestion the unlucky savage who incurs its malig-
nity f- and similar eases are easily found in all parts of the world,
— among the peasants in civilized countries as wxll as among the
savages of the archipelagoes. Spencer and Gillen cite the case
of a Kaitish man who believed that some of the evil magic of a
pointing-stick had gone into his head. ''The natives," they
write, "are people of the most wonderful imagination, and we
thought at first it was going to affect him seriously ; however we
assured him that our medicine chest contained magic powerful
extornal reality to forget: his " mako-bolieve" endures, and there is no
80j)hiHticate(l parent to point out his mistakes. Spencer and GiUen {North-
ern Tribes, etc., p. 252) give a good example of this in the case of the
roots of trees which have forced their way down through the rock into
the water beneath, and which the natives believe to be the whiskers of
the Wollunqua snake who resides in the pool.
SI Frazer, op. cit., I, 13. — Quotes from E. M. Curr, The Australian liacc,
III, 547.
^2 Ibid., I, 321. — Quoted from Old New Zealand, by a Pakeha Maori,
Lon. 1884, p. 96. See further in Frazer for other cases — also p. 60 for
the same thing among European peasants. Cf. also E. Crawley, The Mystic
Ease, Lon. 1902. p. 67; A. W. Hovvitt, Native Tribes of South-East Aus-
tralia, Lon. 1904, pp. 373, 446.
WONDER IN PEIMITIFE MIND, CUSTOM, AND BELIEF. 113
enough to counteract the effect of all the atnilingas in the tribe,
and gradually he recovered his equanimity. "^^ But the term
imagination is here utterly misleading, and furnishes a good
example of the looseness with which psychological terms are
applied by even ethnological specialists. Eigidity of belief,
rather than any liveliness of imagination proper, was the mental
trait liable to produce an unfortunate outcome; and so under-
stood the case is nothing but another example of the force and
extent of the stereotyped aspect of narrowly circumscribed
consciousnesss.
This belief even unto death, as it might be called, due as it
is to the absence of "many ways of conceiving things," and
implying a corresponding density toward other ways of apprecia-
tion — possessing, in a word, both the positive and the negative
characteristics of bigotry — is the adequate compliment of the
perfect credulity under authority, and the equally perfect in-
credulity without authority, which were noticed above. And
when to this belief and credulity, which approximate each other
so closely that they seem hardly differentiated, there are added
the other conditions of simplicity and paucity of imagination,
and belief in that meagre imagination, such as it is, it is at once
apparent that between mental sluggishness and stereotyped
bigotry of conception there is small chance for wonder. These
are indeed tendencies that point directly away from, rather
than toward, that mental plasticity and sense of rarity that were
found in the previous chapter to be the sme qua non of any
wonder beyond mere stupid astonishment. There is no creation
of a new wonder by feats of imagination, as seemed possible for
a moment; there is the throttling of wonder by the readiness of
credulity and the rigidity of belief; incredulity is so absolute as
to eventuate in the sense of the ridiculous, not of wonder ; there
is little or nothing of the ebb and flow of doubt and speculation,
which form the shifting outlines of the belief that, consonant with
wonder, stops short of annihilating it with too absolute a
credence.^* The lower in the human scale the search is carried,
the stronger become these inimical conditions and the further
C3 Spencer and Gillon, Nortliern Tribes, etc., pp. 462-463. Cf. Stoll,
Suggestion und Hypnotismus, etc., Leipzig 1904, p. 121.
c-i Cf. above, p. 80.
114 STUDIES IN THE MAEVELLOVS.
away we move from marvelling. Unless some other tendency-
appear to contravene these, there is as small chance for wonder
from the side of belief and imagination as from the side of
curiosity.
A word about Magic. A few paragraphs above, mention was
made of the dominant powers of association in a narrow con-
sciousness, — of how appearance in thought becomes equivalent to
external reality.^^ It is the body of logical error, occasioned by
this natural confusion of the subjective and the objective, and
rendered concretely obvious in certain peculiar practices, that
is meant by the term magic in this place. The regarding of
antecedence and consequence in time as the same thing as cause
and effect ; the assumption, unconsciously the result of mental
association by similarity, that like effects like, — that, in a word,
"causal connection in thought is equivalent to causative connec-
tion in fact" : — art magic, as Dr. Lang observes, is simply putting
these erroneous principles into action.^** Or, to quote Dr. Frazer,
"A mistaken association of similar ideas produces imitative or
mimetic magic; a mistaken association of contiguous ideas pro-
duces sjTnpathetic magic in the narrower sense of the word. "^^
Thus, to give an example of the mimetic kind, the Bushmen light
fires when they desire rain, with the idea that the black smoke
clouds will attract black rain clouds. The Talus sacrifice black
cattle for the same purpose.^* Of sympathetic magic the readiest
example is the superstition that ill may be worked to an individual
by torturing either any refuse of his body, such as hair, skin or
finger-nails, or anything that has been contiguous to his body,
such as his coat or other part of his dress.'^^ It is this sort of
magic, magic in its simplest terms, that is considered here in its
possible relation to wonder.
In the first place, and briefly, it is to be noted that magic can
occupy no place of rarity in early consciousness, both because of
Bs See above, p. 110.
50 Lang, op. cit., I, 96.
57 Frazer, op. cit., I, 62.
58 Lang, op. cit., I, 99.
58 For further examples, see Frazer as indicated above, note 45 ; or Jcvons,
op. cit.. Chap. IV.
WONDER IN PEIMITIFE MIND, CUSTOM, AND BELIEF. 115
the universality of its fundamental causes, which are found
wherever there is mental association by similarity and contiguity,
— and also because of its constant appearance in objective form
and practice among all the individuals of primitive tribes or com-
munities.^° To us, indeed, the magical powers commonly arrogated
to himself by each member of a tribe appear superhuman and
ridiculous; but to the savage himself they are as much matters
of fact as his physical powers, — as his other physical powers, to
express what would be his own statement if he were capable of
the abstraction. Instead of being the exercise of a rare and special
prerogative of influencing the supernatural, or at least the super-
human, the practice of magic is in his consciousness the mere
exertion of the perfectly well-known and common methods of his
science. ' ' His sympathetic magic is but one branch of his science,
and is not different in kind from the rest"; magic is not
"magical" to the savage.*'^ There needs neither more words nor
further proof immediately to lift the matter of simple magic from
the demesne of wonder.
Can the same be shown of what Dr. Tylor calls ''Animism"?
Can the spirits spoken of by Vierkandt as beings "whose actions
cannot be predicted by calculation and whose motives are
whimsical," be shown to be equally unproductive of marvelling?
It is impossible to approach this subject without defining
what is meant by animism; for there has been a confusion of
application that lays the content of the word open to question.
Animism, as Dr. Lang remarks, is " (1) a sort of instinctive or
unreasoned belief in universal animation, which Mr. Spencer calls
'Animism' and does not believe in; (2) the reasoned belief in
separable and surviving souls of men (and in things), which Mr.
Spencer believes in [and calls the Ghost-theory] and i\Ir. Tylor
calls 'Animism.' ""- The former sort, based as it is upon a sup-
posed lack of differentiation of the animate and inanimate, is
CO See Frazer, op. cit., I, 129, et passim; also I, 66, 72; cf. Brinton, op.
cit., p. 56; Crawley, op. cit., pp. 31, 86; Lang, Making of Eclig., p. 49;
Journ. Am. Folk-Lorc, XVIII, 327; Lang, Myth. Bit. and Belig., I, 85;
Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia, p. 456.
ci Jevous, op. cit., pp. 27, 35. Cf. Brinton, op. cit., p. 13.
02 A. Lang, The Making of Eelig., 2d ed., London 1900, p. 53.
116 STUDIES IN THE MAEVELLOVS.
pretty thoroughly discredited by the observations, put forward
by Van Ende and others, that even the lower animals make such
a distinction."^ The second sort, as defined b}^ Dr. Tylor, is of a
double nature, involving both spirits and gods. "It is habitually
found," he says, "that the theory of Animism divides into two
great dogmas, forming parts of one consistent doctrine; first,
concerning souls of individual creatures, capable of continued
existence after the death or destruction of the body; second,
concerning other spirits, upward to the rank of powerful
deities."®* Whether these two dogmas should be taken together
in the sense that the same spiritual conception extends throughout
the series of souls, demons, and deities, while the conception of
soul is the original one of the series f^ or whether they should be
separated, as Dr. Lang maintains, because of an independent
development of the idea of deity, are questions we fortunately^ do
not have to decide in the search for wonder. Nor is it necessary
to regard the origin of the idea of spirits, whether it arises
from metaphysical sources or from mistaken interpretation of
dream, vision, hallucination, shadow, and the like. For us the
ideas of both gods and souls are there — existent ; and, though the
origin of a belief may sometimes give to the student some dubious
hint of its later subjective value, usually the present value in
popular consciousness of a belief or rite is quite divorced from
any appreciation of the exact nature of its origin. The evolution
of religious belief is always marked by the loss to memory of the
earlier and cruder stages. Since there is thus no call to join the
ranks of either party of disputants, it cannot be interpreted as
giving allegiance or countenance to the one or the other if here,
for the sole sake of clearness in argument, the soul-spirit-demon
side of Animism is regarded by itself, and the deity side post-
poned to another place. For the present then, only the former
case is covered when the word Animism is used.
The extent, according to primitive belief, of the world of
spirits and demons is practically boundless, as Dr. Frazer and
others have most adequately shown. A few cases taken from
<''•■> U. Van Ende, Histoire Naturelle de la Croyance, Paris 1887.
84 Tylor, op. cit., I, 426.
^^•Ihid., IT, 109.
WONDER IN PEIMITIVE MIND, CUSTOM, AND BELIEF. 117
the Golden Bough will serve to recall emphatically the astonish-
ing conditions. "Thus in regard to the aborigines of Australia
we are told that 'the number of supernatural beings, feared if
not loved, that they acknowledge is exceedingly great; for not
only are the heavens peopled with such, but the whole face of the
country swarms with them; every thicket, most watering-places,
and all rocky places abound with evil spirits. In like manner,
every natural phenomenon is believed to be the work of demons,
none of which seem of a benign nature, one and all striving to do
all imaginable mischief to the poor blackf ellow. ' 'The negro,'
says another writer, 'is wont to regard the whole world around
him as peopled with invisible beings, to whom he imputes every
misfortune that happens to him, and from whose harmful
influence he seeks to protect himself by all kinds of magic means. '
. . . Speaking of the spirits which the Indians of Guiana
attribute to all objects in nature, Mr. E. F. im Thurn observes
that 'the whole world of the Indian swarms with these beings.
If by a mighty mental effort we could for a moment revert to a
similar mental position, we should find ourselves everywhere sur-
rounded by a host of possible hurtful beings, so many in number
that to describe them as innumerable would fall ridiculously
short of the truth. It is not therefore wonderful that the Indian
fears to move beyond the light of his camp-fire after dark. . . . ;
nor is it wonderful that occasionally the air around the settle-
ment seems to the Indian to grow so full of beings, that a peaiman
(sorcerer), who is supposed to have the power of temporarily
driving them away, is employed to effect a general clearance of
these beings, if only for a time.' . . . The Tahitians, when
they were visited by Captain Cook, believed that 'sudden deaths
and all other accidents are effected by the immediate action of
some divinity (sic). If a man only stumble against a stone and
hurt his toe, they impute it to an Eatooa; so that they may be
literally said, agreeably to their system, to tread enchanted
ground.' . . . [Among the Maori the spirits] 'were sup-
posed to be so numerous as to surround the living in crowds [like
mosquitoes] ever watching to inflict evil.' ... In Bolang
Mongondo, a district of Celebes, 'all calamities, great and small,
of whatever kind and by whatever name they are called, that
118 STUDIES IN THE MABVELLOUS.
befall men and animals, villages, gardens, and so forth, are
attributed to evil or angry spirits. The superstition is in-
describably great. The smallest wound, the least indisposition,
the most trifling adversity in the field, at the fishing, on a journey
or what not, is believed by the natives to be traceable to the anger
of their ancestors.' . . . The Mantras, an aboriginal race of
the Malay Peninsula, 'find or put a spirit everywhere, in the air
they breathe, in the land they cultivate, in the forests they
inhabit, in the trees they cut dowTi, in the caves of the rocks.
According to them, the demon is the cause of everything that
turns out ill. . . .' "««
The examples can be multiplied indefinitely. In this populous
realm of superstition, what is the status of wonder and the won-
derful ? In the first place, it will be seen immediately that there
are certain conditions that, according to our descriptive stand-
ard, are opposed to wonder. There is no rarity. Spirits are
common, and extremely intimate in their intercourse with men.
They hardly can be said to constitute * another world, ' so entirely
is their activity in this. They are as common as the diseases and
misfortunes they cause; and like those experiences they are
calamities, — not wonders. As personifications of disease they
enjoy the very real, and equally common, characteristics of the
diseases themselves. It has already been observed"^ that rarities
in experience lose their wonder because of their instantaneous
explanation by reference to this great and common premise of
spiritual influence : the further observation may now be made
that their very commonness tends to keep the spirits themselves
from taking on the air of the wonderful. Furthermore, the
materialistic conception of spirits tends to make wonder even
more remote. Associated with them is nothing of the modern
idealistic and tenuous character of a supernatural, transcendent,
unembodied power ; instead, either they are so vaguely conceived
as to be hardly liiore than ' influences, '"* or else no distinction is
made between them and persons. The methods adopted to expel
spirits conclusively show the naive materialism of the savage.
66 Prazer, op. vit., Ill, 41 ff.
67 See above, p. 102.
68 Cf. Crawley, op. cit., p. 19.
WONDER IN PEIMITIFE MIND, CUSTOM, AND BELIEF. 119
Screaming and beating the air with sticks, pelting with stones,
stalking an infected village and clearing it of demons by assault,
pulling the evil spirits down from the roof by ropes, shutting
gates against them, scaring away fever-demons by terrific noise
and war-like preparations, charging them with squadrons of
elephants,*'^ — these, and many other physical means of expulsion,
can point to nothing else than a belief that spirits have bodies
and functions, powers and susceptibilities, like those of the men
whom they persecute. If any further proof is needed, the world-
wide primitive conception of soul as a material entity can be
cited.^'' Again, in the universal fear evinced toward these
malignant spirits lies another condition incompatible with won-
der. Practically all the cases cited by Dr. Frazer insist upon
the dread with which the savage regards the cruel propensities
of the demon hosts. Personified causes of misfortunes as they are,
they are hated as the misfortunes are feared. In sickness and
pain, fear and hatred usurp the attention ; and when the respon-
sibility for suffering can be placed upon concrete shoulders, no
time is lost in wondering at the matter. Pain demands allevia-
tion; the offenders' shoulders must be chastised. Nothing of
awe, which goes with wonder as we have seen, but everj^hing
of fear, which, as we have also seen, preoccupies the mind, is
the perpetual and harassing attendant of these primitive spir-
itualists. One would think that under such nervous conditions
corpulence Avould be a rarity so great and inexplicable as to
be marvellous! Finally, the perfect belief in all these spirits,
the absolute, matter-of-fact assumption of their material reality,
the air of what might proleptically be called scientific certitude,
is enough in itself to render the supposition of wonder extremely
precarious. Such a belief is the natural accompaniment, or the
meet culmination, of a superstition that is singularly sterile in
wonder-tendencies in spite of its possession of many apparent
incentives to the feeling of mystery : but spirits are the most usual
of primitive visitors.
There may be noticed, however, in the second place, that
even among these spirit-swarms there are certain hints of
60 Frazer, op. cit., Ill, 60 ff.
70 Vid. ib., I, 248; II, 57; III, 351.
120 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS.
strangeness, which are bound sooner or later to grow into con-
ditions favoring wonder. The prevailing, though by no means
unexceptional, invisibility of the demon is as rich a source of
wonder-development as can be wished. In dreams, indeed, all
maj' have seen demons ; in visions the wizards are supposed to
behold them; and at times of great excitement, when a whole
village is in frenzied pursuit of the plaguing sprites, many act-
ually believe they see them dodging and running about. But,
for the most part, houses are beaten, and streets charged, with-
out any visible meeting with the dreaded invaders. When belief,
for one cause or another, shall grow less absolute, this invis-
ibility will become a distinguishing mark, and the cause of many
premonitory ghost-shivers. Again, the power of the unholy
spirits, though so man-like, is always open to exaggeration,
which, in turn, will tend ultimately to a more and more refined
intangibility. Wliether or not in the cases indicated, say that
of the Australians, for instance, there is already anything of
the supernatural, it is extremely difficult to say, because of
the extremely modern and sophisticated connotation of the word
supernatural. Certainly nothing of the supernatural in the
sense of that which contravenes systematized categories of ex-
perience : but it is absurd to deny that the Australian is conscious
of the supernatural in the sense of a power greater than his owti
— the sense which Principal Jevons supports ;'^^ for the admission
means nothing more than repeating that the spiritual powers were
not 'spiritual,' but material. As Crawley puts it, "Primitive
man believes in the supernatural, but supernatural beings and
existences are to him really material — the supernatural is a
part of and obeys the laws of nature. "^^
We may now pause to summarize the results already obtained.
All the premises and tendencies of primitive thought and belief
so far noticed, with the possible exception of the one ingredient
of invisibility in the last case, lead away from wonder rather
than toward it; and they evince a general disposition on the
part of early mental and religious conditions to have less and
"1 Jevons, op. cit., pp. 19, 23, 41.
72 Crawley, op. cit., p. 62.
WONDER IN PRIMITIVE MIND, CUSTOM, AND BELIEF. 121
less to do with wonder the more primitive they are. We have
now practically covered the field indicated by the picture
drawn by Vierkandt. In one way or another — by the discussion
of the mental and emotional cues to wonder, surprise, reflection,
curiosity, imagination, credulity, belief, fear; or of the insti-
tution, as it may be called, of magic ; or of the data of animism,
so far as we have undertaken them — the premises, and the sub-
jective and objective characteristics, of that typical picture have
been mentioned and commented upon.
Is the task, then, ended? Has the field of tendencies been
explored sufficiently, and is the general negative conclusion in
the matter of wonder and marvel to stand as it now is? The
task cannot be so simple. Human nature is not so amenable
to one-way categories. It always has a habit of disturbing the
best laid and best considered of such rigid cabinet-filings. The
student too often sees only one way of the web, and forgets the
warp in the woof. It is proper, therefore, to turn again to the
general field of primitive conditions with the expectation of
finding in some matters not mentioned by Vierkandt the pres-
ence, or at least the seed, of contrary tendencies that will count
toward the development of a sense of wonder even in very early
conditions. Now the logic of the case, as it stands revealed by
the steps already taken, indicates that what is necessary for
this development of wonder is a certain specialization and
uniqueness here and there in the midst of common and universal
conditions, a separating and secluding tendency, by which the
individuality that belongs to rarity may grow up in the midst
of the communal character and characteristics of primitive life.
It is the particular, the glaringly personal, the discrete fruit
of variety apotheosized in exaggerated specialties and close cor-
porations, that is needed as much for the production of real
wonder as for the economic and social advance of the horde or
clan. And it is in the hitherto neglected side of animism, in
its aspect or dogma of separate, overlording deities — great, par-
ticular, and individual spirits, far removed from the ordinary
demon — that the first of such specializing tendencies may be
noted.
Upon the nature of the gods, however, the anthropologists
122 STUDIES IN THE MABVELLOUS.
do not agree. AVhile the older anthropology has been in the
habit of regarding them as segregations from the great animistic
company of ghosts and spirits,^^ Dr. Lang has of late strongly,
though to very few convincingly, supported the theory that
'savage supreme beings', such as the Australian Daramulun,
originate in no specialization within animistic circles, are not
spiritual beings at all, but are the idealizations of the savage
himself, as conceived by himself. Such a being "was not origin-
ally differentiated as 'spirit' or 'not spirit'. He is a Being, con-
ceived of without the question of 'spirit' or 'no spirit' being
raised; perhaps he was originally conceived of before that
question could be raised by men. When we call the Supreme
Being of savages a 'spirit' we introduce our own animistic
ideas into a conception where it may not have originally existed.
If the god is 'the savage himself raised to the n*^ power' so
much the less of a spirit is he. "^* A very questionable proof
and illustration of this theory is the case of Daramulun. Mr.
Howitt writes thus: "This supernatural being, by whatever
name he is known, is represented as having at one time dwelt
on the earth, but afterwards to have ascended to a land beyond
the sky, where he still remains, observing mankind. As Dara-
mulun, he is said to be able to 'go anywhere and do anything.'
He can be invisible; but when he makes himself visible, it
is in the form of an old man of the Australian race. He is evi-
dently everlasting, for he existed from the beginning of all
things, and he still lives. But in being so, he is merely in the
state in which, these aborigines believe, everyone would be if
not prematurel}' killed by evil magic. Combining the statements
of the legends and the teachings of the ceremonies, I see, as
the embodied idea, a venerable kindly Headman of a tribe,
full of knowledge and tribal \\nsdom, and all-powerful in magic,
of which he is the source, with virtues, failings, and passions,
such as the aborigines regard them. Such, I think, they picture
the All-Father to be, and it is most difficult for one of us to
divest himself of the tendency to endow such a supernatural
"3 See, e.g., Jevons, op. cit., p. 17.5; Im Thurn, in Journ. Anthrop. Instit.,
XI, 374; and Tylor, as quoted above, note G4.
T* Lang, Making of Belig., p. 187.
WONDER IN PEIMITIFE MIND, CUSTOM, AND BELIEF. 123
being with a nature quasi-diyine, if not altogether so — divine
nature and character. "^^ Later on, indeed, with the popular-
ization of ghost and spirit worship, such a Being as this All-
Father would by analogy come to be regarded as a spirit and
be placed side by side with other "non-original gods that were
once ghosts."'*^
The best thing to be done, in view of the present state of
the question, is to speak of the following kinds of gods : original
gods who are Supreme Fathers and non-animistic ; gods who
were originally ghosts or other spirits, and are not Supreme
Fathers, and who appear in great number as local deities, or
as tutelary deities of sections of the community, or as tutelary
deities of individuals;^^ lastly, original gods who became anim-
istic by analogy. Now, in any class the element of individuality
or specialization, and so of the rarity that makes for wonder,
is distinctly present. Two particular cases, however, should be
noted. In the first place, in whatever way the god arises, he
is universally distinguished from the animistic crowd by his
benign intentions toward men and even helpful offices in their
behalf. Such goodness, though, does not produce intimacy in
the popular breast to anywhere near the degree that intimacy
is precipitated by the malignity of the demons. The good god
means, to the savage, the harmless god, whom he need not worry
about in the course of his struggles against the torments of the
fiends.'^ The air of remoteness which is thus attendant upon
the segregation of the god, and which is rather fostered than
otherwise by the esoteric teachings of the initiation ceremonies
described by Howitt, and Spencer and Gillen, will possess a
double tendency, — toward both awe and neglect. The sense of
wonder lags under such conditions. Inasmuch as they are not
continually present to the popular consciousness, there is, in-
deed, a rarity about the great gods; but so great is the remote-
ness that makes the rarity that the wonder becomes more and
75 A. W. Howitt, Native Tribes of South-East Australia, London 1904,
pp. 500-501,
7e Lang, Making of Belig., pp. 189, 190.
77 Cf. Jevons, op. cit., p. 163.
78 In some cases the neglect may be due to other causes. See Jevons,
op. cit., p. 181.
124 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS.
more a thing of special or esoteric resuscitation. The vividness
of wonder is proportioned to the immediate and striking contra-
vention of familiar experiences, to the interruption of the
affairs of men and women in their intimate surroundings and
oflfiees. By the unlearned peasant, as well as by the ignorant
savage, the wonder of Jack the Giant-Killer, for instance, is
felt far more and far oftener than the wonder of a creation
story. But peasant and savage both experience, at times of
religious initiation or celebration, the wonder of the ancient and
remote. Thus the greater gods are always a source of wonder
to the human breast; but a source that is often quiescent, and
the power of which is latent until revivified by special con-
ditions of social custom, or by particular circumstances of
individual moment.
In the second place, it is to be noted that the original Su-
preme Father of Dr. Lang's argument derives no wonder from
spiritual sources until far on in his downward career. This does
not mean that he possesses no wonder of his own. The awe and
reverence with which he is regarded, the secret nature of his
rites, and the mystery of his revelation,'" all indicate conditions
eminentl}' favorable to, if not the actual presence of, wonder.
Indeed, the w^onder attaching to him is in all probability far
greater than could ever be derived from his alliance with the
commonplace crowd of spirits and ghosts. Dr. Lang himself
claims that with the rise of ghost-worship the All-Father becomes
more and more an indifferent and little regarded power.^"
Again, the powers of Daramulun, Baiame, and the like, are such
as indicate a wonderful nature. It will be necessary in a
few moments to show that the magicians are supposed to derive
their extraordinary gifts from the gods, who are represented
as the sole source of all such gifts. The tale of the other powers
of the gods, equally out of the ordinary', equally unique and
limited to themselves, may be found in the passage in Howitt
to which reference has already been made.®^ There may be won-
der without spirits; and many a wonderful tribal hero Or head-
7» Howitt, op. cit., p. 489 ff.
80 Lang, Making of Eelig., pp. XX, 190.
81 See above, p. 123.
WONDER IN PEIMITIVE MIND, CUSTOM, AND BELIEF. 125
man, idealized by tradition and exaggerated by piety, becomes
a spirit only with the rise of the rival spirits in popular regard.
The segregation of the god is paralleled, and undoubtedly
also increased, by the segregation of his special mortal servant,
the priest. The relation of priest and magician in primitive life
is a matter of dispute. While, on the one hand, it is undeniable
that in many races individuals are found who combine the func-
tions of priest and sorcerer, and that in many highly developed
priesthoods of civilized nations the priest retains certain powers
undeniably of magical origin, it is equally certain, on the other
hand, that the notable struggle in advanced communities between
priest and sorcerer, between magic and religion, is duplicated
among the lower races in the opposition of the orthodox med-
icine-man to the shrewd, crafty, imtruthful, and unscrupulous
charlatan, who holds no office of public trust, but preys upon
the simple and ignorant. Francis La Flescher has eloquently
insisted on this opposition; and has shown clearly how the
venality of the charlatan, and his readiness to perform for a
consideration, have always obscured in the eyes of strangers
the real religion and high idealism of the sacred and secretive
office of the priest.**- Exactly what this state of affairs may
mean — whether the priest has evolved from the magician, or
the two, separate and distinguishable in the beginning, have
in the course of later development mutually borrowed the powers
of each other, while still maintaining an antagonism of offices —
is a matter that must be left to the specialists. For present
purposes the best must be made of a bad matter by regarding
the two offices separately.
Aside from the specialization of the office, which in itself
is a strong factor of rarity, there are other conditions — in part,
perhaps, aspects of this segregation — that indubitably produce a
tendency toward the wonderful. For one thing, the close relation
between the offices of king and priest,®^ so often amounting to
identity, doth hedge them mutually with a supreme dignity and
s^ Journal of American Folh-Lore, XVIII, 274; cf. Jevons, p. 289;
Lang, Making of Belig., p. 183; Frazer, I, 64.
ssPrazer, op. cit.. Index under "Kings as Gods"; Jevons, p. 275 ff.
126 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS.
awful sanctity. Again, the function of mediating between man
and god, of supplying the necessary channel of supplication and
communication, is always a present reminder of tlie extraor-
dinary powers of the deity's agent. But greater than either
of these is the possession by the priest of actually divine power,
received by him as the representative and chief servitor of the
god. "Among his associates he is looked upon as set apart
from other men by the divinitj^ which chooses him for its agent,
or dwells within him. In the Polynesian Islands this is forcibly
expressed in the terms applied to the native priests, pia atua,
'god boxes', receptacles of divinity; and amama, 'open mouths',
for through them the god speaks, not their own selves."®* — The
chief evidence of this power, and often the origin of the claim
to the priestly office, is in itself one of the most fertile sources
of wonder to be met with in primitive life. This remarkable
evidence, distinguished by a rarity and fearful intensity appro-
priate to its character as a propaedeutic to one of the rarest
of offices, is that body of phenomena nowadays studied under
the various heads of suggestion, hypnotism, mesmerism, neuro-
pathy, psychical phantasms, pneumatische Erfahrungen, and the
like. The uncritical mind and narrow consciousness of the sav-
age lay him open to such experiences in a degree hardly as yet
realized ; and, among the members of the horde, the neurotic who
is the greatest adept in trance, nervous convulsions, hysteria,
and the whole range of that sort of thing, is regarded as a sacred
and inspired character. "These inspired seers represent the
priesthood of every primitive religion. They cultivate [mystic
power] and preserve it, and in them the missionaries of higher
faiths have ever found their most resolute foes and successful
opponents. The reason is, as I have said, that the sliaman has
himself been face to face with God, has heard Ilis voice, and
felt His presence. His faith therefore is real, and cannot be
shaken by any argument. He may indeed, and he generally
does, assist his public performances with some trickery, some
thaumaturgy; but that this is merely superadded for effect is
proved by the general custom that when one such adept is ill
84 Brinton, op. cit., p. 58; cf. Frazer, I, 249.
WONDER IN PRIMITIVE MIND, CUSTOM, AND BELIEF. 127
or in straits he will solicit the aid of another."**^ Moreover, it
may be noted, the very addition of such thaumaturgy indicates
the general atmosphere of wonder in which the whole per-
formance is witnessed. Here, at least, is a power distinctly
immediate in its interruption of the usual courses of daily
affairs, whether it be experienced by the layman or by the
priest. Indeed, it is hard to conceive of a stronger stimulus
to wonder than these strange and awful experiences, wrung
from within our own selves, or particularly evident (in their
intense disturbances of ordinary vocations) in the vivid con-
tortions of the adepts; nor would it be altogether fanciful to
attempt philosophically to trace all wonder back to these mystic
and mysterious, even as yet only partly understood, eruptions
of a subliminal life. Short even of a speculative attempt, an
actually empirical demonstration of such an origin might be made
with the aid of that pile of evidence which has been gathered for
establishing the foundation of religion in such experiences. Of
all the tendencies for wonder, this is undoubtedly the greatest,
if it be not the common source of all.
The magician, also, delves in these mysterious effects of an
unknown, misunderstood mental pathology. Dr. StoU, in his
eminently suggestive, if not exhaustive work. Suggestion und
Hypnotismus in der VolkerpsycJiologie (2d ed., Leipzig 1904),
has traced the evidence through many races and ages. Among
the Australians, for instance, he finds the Boyl-yas are endowed
with powers in which the possible and impossible are mixed
without critical regard. As a particular indication of the sug-
gestion-nature of the activity of the magicians, he cites the
manner in which they obtain their powers.^" M. Mauss, in an
exhaustive article, L'Origine des pouvoirs magiques dans les
societes Australiennes,^'' clearly shows this suggestive nature of
initiation. The prevailing method of acquiring the art is, ac-
cording to this writer, revelation by the dead, by spirits or
85 Brinton, op. cit., p. 58.
soStoll, op. cit., pp. 113 ff.; cf. Crawley, op. cit., pp. 23, 24.
8T £cole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Sect. Religieuses, Paris 1904, pp.
14 ff.
128 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS.
mythic personages, by more complex forms. ®^ Mr. Hewitt, in
the seventh chapter of the work already cited, gives a long ac-
count of the making of medicine-men; suggestion and thauma-
turgy play the leading roles. Moreover, the powers of the magi-
cian are equalled by the weirdness of his initiation. ' ' The power
of the doctor is only circumscribed by the range of his fancy.
He communes witli spirits, takes aerial flights at pleasure, kills
or cures, is invulnerable and invisible at will, and controls the
elements. "^^ Howitt mentions his powers as: supernatural
powers, healing and causing disease, magical practices, rain-
making, clairvoyant power, spirit mediumship, special forms of
magic, and the possession of songs of enchantment.^** Thus, the
magician, as well as the priest, is the recipient and agent of
powers that distinctly lift him above his fellows as a man of
wonder and worker of marvels.
The fact of social separateness is here also. In spite of the
common possession by the members of his tribe of neuropathic
experiences, the shaman is universally distinguished by actual
differences of conduct and appearance, as well as by the exer-
cise of superior powers. Not only has the wizard, for instance,
the power of communicating with spirits during waking hours,
while the ordinary mortal can meet such only in sleep,"^ but,
as M. ]\Iauss indicates, "he feels himself different and does not
lead the same life, as much from the necessity of imposing upon
others as because he imposes upon himself, — particularly because
he fears to lose the extraordinarily fugitive qualities acquired.
He becomes, he remains, he is obliged to continue 'another.' He
has in part a 'new soul.' He is a being whom society makes
expand, and he himself must develop his personality until some-
times it is almost confounded with that of the 'superior be-
ings.' "®^ The strenuous forms of initiation, so carefully
guarded, in themselves show the attitude adopted toward the
office and its powers. But a still further and extremely cogent
88 See Journ. Am. Folk-Lore, XVIII, 327.
8» Frazer, op. cit., I, 73.
00 Op. cit., Ch. VII.
01 Lang, Maling of Belig., p. 49.
02 J. A. F., XVIII, 327.
WONDER IN PEIMITirE MIND, CUSTOM, AND BELIEF. 129
factor supports the argument for a wonder-tendency in this
place; and that is the character of the belief in the powers of
the magician. There is here just that room for slight doubt that
is the best growing-ground for wonder. The belief of the savage
in magic may indeed, on the one hand, be said to be implicit;
but there are nevertheless certain circumstances that undermine
that implicitness, though the contrary forces may seldom or
never reach the expression of skepticism. I quote from Spencer
and Gillen. ' ' Whilst living in close intercourse with the natives,
spending the days and nights amongst them in their camps while
they were preparing for and then enacting their most sacred
ceremonies, and talking to them day after day, collectively and
individually, we were constantly impressed with the idea, as
probably many others have been before, that one blackfellow
will often tell you that he can and does do something magical,
whilst all the time he is perfectly well aware that he cannot, and
yet firmly believes that some other man can really do it. In order
that his fellows may not be considered in this respect as superior
to himself he is obliged to resort to what is really a fraud, but
in course of time he may even come to lose sight of the fact
that it is fraud which he is practising upon himself and his fel-
lows. ""^ Is there a more common or fruitful source of wonder
than this disbelief in one's own powers but fearful belief in
those of others ?°* Is there any more fecund ground of supersti-
tion to-day? Is not this state, preeminently human in its sub-
servience to custom and pathetic deceit, the half-conscious but
strenuously unacknowledged state in which every spiritualist
and mystic finds himself to-day, even as Paracelsus and Empedo-
eles found themselves centuries ago? Verily, this is the secret
mark of the wonder-lover and the wonder-worker ! Nor is
there need of further words to clarify the wonder-tendency of
the primitive magician.
When magic becomes 'magical,' it becomes marvellous. When
one is inclined to believe, against his better knowledge, that the
magician or witch possesses a power over affairs that is dis-
tinctly' a contravention of usual fact, i.e., natural law, the wizard
0^ Native Tribes, etc., p. 130.
9*Cf. Crawley, op. cit., p. 86; Howitt, op. cit., pp. 411, 533.
130 STUDIES IN THE MAEVELLOVS.
is elevated to the higher realm of marvel. A word as to how
this step is taken. The case is briefly presented as follows: "A
curious instance of the continued influence of magic over reli-
gions and races who have discarded it is to be found in the
belief that inferior peoples and faiths conquered by such higher
races possess greater magical powers. * * * Hence resort is
made to members of the inferior race by their superiors when
they wish diseases cured or injuries to be subtly avenged. In
this way the Dravidians of India, the rude races of the Malay
Peninsula, the Finns and Laps, the negroes of the West Indies,
are regarded respectively by Hindus, ]\Iohammedan Malays,
Scandinavians, and Christian whites as having powerful magic.
So, too, the ancient Greeks regarded the Thessalians, and medi-
aeval Christians the pagans of the north, or stole in secret to
the ghettos wiiere the despised Jew was supposed to practise
his strong magic. ' '^^ As Jevons sums it up : " Hence the more
civilised race find themselves face to face with this extraordinary
fact, namely, that things which they know to be supernatural
are commonly and deliberately brought about by members of
the other race."®® There could hardly be a better proof of the
correctness of our description of the psychology of the marvel-
lous than this case which so perfectly fits what was laid down
on that subject in the previous chapter.^'
Finally, there is still another factor, which, while indicating
a general perception by the rude mind of whatever is abnormal
or strange, provides for the particular isolation of priest and
magician. I mean taboo, the institution of the "strongly
marked." Whatever its origin, whether in fear, or holiness, or
the merely strange and abnormal, or what not,"^ taboo incor-
porates the specializing tendency of the mind in a custom
provocative of awe and reverence, and indicative of high
authority. As such, taboo is to be regarded as a custom in
harmony with the other specializing tendencies that count
0'' MaccuUoch, J. A., Religion (Temple Primers), London 1904, p. 6fi.
80 Jevons, p. 37; cf. Gomme, Ethnoloqy in Folklore, New York 1892,
Chap. III.
07 See above, especially pp. 75 flF.
08 (;/■. Jevons, Chaps. VI, VII, VIII; Crawley, op. cit., vid. Index.
WONDER IN PRIMITIVE MIND, CUSTOM, AND BELIEF. 131
for wonder, and as particularly supplementing and sanctitying,
or at least certifying, them by a common and social reverence
which is recognized and scrupulously observed by every member
of the community. Indeed, if there were more space at our dis-
posal, it might be shown that just as the Dakotans applied the
term wakan to "ever>i;hing extraordinary or immense, out of
the course of nature, and especially to everything sacred or
divine,"'"' so the custom of taboo, universal and common as it is,
marks by its associations of awe and reverence the germ of the
recognition of that which, because it appears to transcend nat-
ural law, carries one into the realms of marvelling. As the spir-
itual explanation of the unusual became rarer, and reflection
commoner, taboo must have become more and more the pronun-
ciamento of the unknown and inexplicable. In its application
to priest and magician, at any rate, may be seen its conscious
employment in some such meaning, still further isolating the
sanctity and wonder it certifies.
All the specializing tendencies so far noticed have been be-
liefs incorporated in practices or individuals. There is one
other, and last, and, for the student of literature, chief, tendency
that makes for wonder and marvel and contravenes the negative
results of our contemplation of Vierkandt's composite of prim-
itive mind. This, also, is a specializing tendency; but of quite
another kind. For it is subjective; it is not on institution. It
partakes also of a certain sort of generalization ; for it has the
effect of raising the individual into a typical greatness and
universal importance. Indeed, it is the mental factor concerned
in the elevation of gods and priests and magicians, and of the
neuropathic experiences of taboo, to an impressive importance
above the ordinary and commonplace. These are all children
of exaggeration. Exaggeration has lifted them all up into nota-
bility; exaggeration has cro"\vned priests, and endowed magi-
cians; has magnified the gods, and intensified fits of ecstasy,
and elaborated the realm of taboo. It has been the more or
less unconscious creator of wonderful beliefs and forms and
offices. But it has not stopped there : it has found expression
00 Briuton, op. cit., p. 61.
132 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS.
elsewhere. Indeed it is with a further expression of the habit
of exaggerating that we come at hist upon the dynamic force
of wonder, by which, as into an entangling web, the objects
and cases of wonder, already noted as customs and beliefs, are
woven. Exaggeration employs this further expression in its
common, every-day practice of talking and telling and recount-
ing the multitude of passing experiences and past experiences.
And into the tale are woven the wonder-stot-k of custom and
belief, of god and priest, of magician and the "magical," of
trance and wakan. Tales of the gods themselves are rehearsed;
the magician is now the subject, now the machinery of the
recital. The seeing of the dead motives the wonder-tale ; and
exaggeration makes untruth true. Exaggeration is the most
primitive form of imagination; its employment is the first evi-
dence of plasticity, of freedom in that stiff imaginative faculty
already noticed. As such, exaggeration is the first door opening
into that ideal realm of the marvellous spoken of in the previous
chapter; and thus, too, it becomes the gateway of wonder into
literature.^"" All the tendencies, all the cases noted so far, are
but the colors and tones present to the hand of exaggeration as
it spins its web of romance, — as it disports freely in tale and
legend, until a critical age regards it with a cold and disapprov-
ing eye, and an empirical science rings the first knell of the
imaginative interpretation of life.
We shall see this power working upon the memory of cele-
brated gods, priests, and magicians. Howitt says of one of his
native informants: "The man's information as to the customs
of his tribe, and especially as to the initiation ceremonies, I
found to be very accurate, but it was when he began to speak
of the magical powers of the old men of the past generation
that I found his coloring to be too brilliant, and more especially
as regarded his tribal father, the last great warrior-magician
of the tribe. In his exaggeration of the exploits of this man one
might see an in.structive example of how very soon an heroic
halo of romance begins to gather around the memory of the
illustrious dead. ' '^"^ We shall see the same power working upon
1"' Cf. above. Chap. TI, pp. 74, S.^-SS, 91.
i"! Op. cit., p. 3.57; cf. also p. 444. (The italics in the text are mine.)
WONDER IN PRIMITIVE MIND, CUSTOM, AND BELIEF. 133
mere tales of adventure, the classic example being perhaps the
wonder-tales of the Polynesian Omai upon his return from
Europe to the South Seas.^^^ What marvels were his to tell ! Of
how the English had ships as big as his native island, and guns
so big that many men might sit inside of them! Everything
was big, very big! So a child's imagination begins by convert-
ing magnificently his experiences into indescribable 'bigness'.
Again, we shall see exaggeration extended by analogy from
familiar to unfamiliar fields, until all the world of internal and
external experiences is conquered by the advancing power. Then,
indeed, the universe will be subject to wonder : and the dynasty
of the marvellous will last for centuries. Yet further: with
the wonders of exaggeration fully established, we shall see the
beginning of the failure of its power, and of the decay of its
throne, through the gradual assertion of those very mental pro-
cesses that in the previous chapter were described as inimical to
wonder. Within the ideal realm of story-telling, rarities will
cease to be rare through repetition; marvels will be destroyed
by an advancing sophistry; unbelief will raise the ridiculous
where once all was awe; reason will succeed imagination; and
a new day and power will be born from the old. But in both
days the mind of man in its ebb and flow of wonder will remain
the same; and each ebb tide will give way to a new flood of
marvel.
The preliminary field of wonder has now been more or less
adequately covered. The dynamic power that is to make the
literature of wonder has been named; the tendencies of belief
and custom assisting that power have been indicated; the con-
trary tendencies have been unfolded at greater length; in both
sets, the actual materials present to the exercise of the dj-namic
power have been suggested : thus we possess an indication of the
directions in which we may expect to find the practice of wonder.
A previous chapter has supplied us with a description of the
complex mental operations of wonder and marvel and their allied
states : thus we possess a means of appraising the wonder- value
1U2 Kippis, Cook's Voyages, p. 301.
134 STUDIES IN THE MAEVELLOUS.
of whatever we examine. Impulse, tendencies, materials, stand-
ards of judgment, — all these are now at hand. We are in position
to go forward into the actual fields of literary beginnings and
search for wonder and marvel. It is proposed to make this
application in one of the lower fields, — the Australian ; to note
there the special conditions under which the general processes
are at work, and to examine these processes at work in myth and
legend.
CHAPTER IV.
WONDER IN CENTRAL AUSTRALIAN BELIEF AND STORY.
Discussion of sources — General cultural conditions of Cen-
tral Australians; identity among tribes; low stage of culture
— In such a stage the forces against wonder strongly present
— More important to regard the forces making for wonder —
General crowd of spirits not wonderful to natives — Particular
spirits and wonder — No gods — Other particular spirits — Magi-
cian and wonder; segregation and initiation; extraordinary
powers; deceit; exaggeration — Totemie traditions and legends
— Heroic and aitiological legends — Wonder in the heroic —
Combination of animal and human characteristics — The inmin-
tera, Churinga, and Wollunqua — Character of the legends as a
whole — The beginning of wonder in literature — Summary: the
relation between the beginnings of wonder and of literature.
At the beginning of the previous chapter it was promised
that the danger of unreliable information concerning savage
races would be met by a careful selection of cases from the
works of trained ethnologists. It is a notable and encouraging
piece of good fortune that within the last seven years there
have been made upon the culture of very primitive races most
careful and discriminating researches. The natives of south-
east, central, and north-central Australia have been described
by trained observers in three long and invaluable works which
mark an epoch in the history of the histories of primitive man.
Of these three English books that of A. W. Howitt^ should be
mentioned first, because, although in its present form it bears
the imprint of a date later than one of the other two, it is
nevertheless the final edition of an older series of articles long
since famous under the names of their authors, Howitt and
Fison. ■ The other two books have been received with an en-
thusiasm hardly second to the gratitude all ethnologists owe
to Howitt and Fison. Two other names are now linked as col-
laborators in this field; Spencer and Gillen have become as
1 A. W. Howitt, The Native Tribes of South-East Australia, London 190-4.
136 STUDIES IN THE MABVELLOUS.
familiar to ethnological footnotes as the other famous pair. In
1899 appeared their tirst publieation, The Native Tribes of Cen-
tral Australia; and five years later the companion volume, The
Northern Tribes of Central Australia, made its bulky way into
immediate favor. It is from these works, so opportunely at
hand, and especially from the one last named, that the data
for the present discussion of wonder and marvel in Australian
belief and story are selected. So exliaustive are the works that
it will seldom be necessary to step beyond them to the less trust-
worthy sources of earlier and untrained observation.
Before undertaking the direct examination of the collected
myths and legends of some of the Australian tribes, it will be
proper to enter into a short discussion of the general economic
and religious conditions of the individual tribes that are to
fall under the present view. Thus may be avoided that unfor-
tunate lack of definition of particular cultural strata so wisely
deprecated by Professor Dewey,^ and so thoroughly destructive
to a history of the sequences of any one tendency or class of
phenomena. In the shifting phantasmagoria of tendencies that
make now toward, now away from, wonder and marvel, there
is need enough for whatever aid can be had from careful strat-
ification of economic conditions; while the only satisfactory
method of correlating what may appear as the different stages
of the development of wonder, from the naive creations of the
mind of the savage to the sophisticated productions of the Greek
romancers, lies not in the application of descriptive adjectives
to each step, but in the determination of the association of each
step with definite cultural epochs.
In their second book Spencer and Gillen describe the social
organization, the customs, and beliefs of the aborigines resident
in north-central Australia between the Macdonnell ranges, in
the center of the continent, and the Gulf of Carpenteria. Their
former book had described the Arunta and Urabunna, lying to
the south of the Macdonnell ranges. The chief northern tribes
observed were the Unmatjera, Kaitish, Warramunga, and Tjin-
gilli. In their progress northward the authors were able to trace
as they went "a gradual change amongst the tribes in regard to
2 For reference, see above, p. 97, note 15.
WONDER IN CENTRAL AUSTRALIAN BELIEF AND STORY. 137
organization and beliefs, and at the same time to demonstrate
a fundamental agreement in regard to certain important mat-
ters."^ One notable agreement was the universal belief that
"every living member of the tribe is a reincarnation of a spirit
ancestor." "As we pass northwards we find the Arunta be-
liefs and customs merging into those of the Kaitish, the latter
into those of the Warramunga, Tjingilli, and Umbaia, and these
again, in their turn, into those of the coastal tribes, the Gnaji,
Binbinga, Anula, and Mara. Not only is this so, but in the south
we find the beliefs of the Urabunna tribe agreeing fundament-
ally with those of the Arunta. We are thus able to demonstrate
the fact that there is no radical difference, so far as important
beliefs and customs are concerned, between tribes which count
descent in the male line, and others which count it in the female
line. . . . Taking every class of evidence into account, it
appears to us to be very difficult to avoid the conclusion that
the central tribes, which, for long ages, have been shielded by
their geographical isolation from external influences, have re-
tained the most primitive form of customs and beliefs. It is
an easy matter to imagine the beliefs of the more northern
tribes resulting as a modification of original ones, more or less
similar to those now held by the central tribes, but the reverse
process is not conceivable."* In the introductory chapter that
follows, the authors remark emphatically upon "the identity
or close agreement of the tribes in regard to important customs
and beliefs." This appears true in spite of the geographical
and linguistic isolation of the tribes, which may have been, as
the authors surmise, the result of climatic changes.^
From these and other remarks of like nature throughout the
book, it is to be noted that all these tribes are for our purposes
in practically the same cultural condition, but that the Arunta
series probably offers the nearest approach to that older culture
from which they must all have descended. Dr. Frazer has main-
tained that the Arunta represent the savage at his lowest depth.
Secluded in that most secluded of continents, where the past
3 N. T.2 {=Northern Tribes of Central Australia), xi.
4N. T.2, xi.
5 See N. T.2, 14, for summary of resemblances and diflferences.
138 STUDIES IN THE MABFELLOUS.
seems to have been preserved as in a great miiseiim, where
types of flora and fauna long since extinct in all other parts
of the world are only now becoming extinct, — isolated in that
strangely backward continent, the Ariinta present a vast con-
trast, not only to civilized man, but even to many savage races.
To illustrate that contrast Frazer emphasizes two of the points
brought out by Spencer and Gillen. It appears that although
these Australians suffer much from the cold, it has never oc-
curred to them to use as garments the pelts of the wild beasts
they have killed. "They huddle, naked and shivering, about
little fires, into which, when they drop off to sleep, they are
apt to roll and scorch themselves." For a second illustration,
they do not understand the true physiology of sex, but imagine
that birth is due to the entrance of ancestral spirits into the
bodies of the women.** Of course Dr. Lang, in his usual breezy
fashion, insists upon "collaborating by suggesting objections,'"'
but in the matter of the points noted his success is more rhetor-
ical than real. For the rest, it is enough to remark that these
tribes are all in the hunting stage, and the lowest at that; that
their implements are of stone, and of the nature "usually de-
scribed as characteristic of Pala3olithic and Neolithic man";*
that they possess no pottery, but only wooden pitchis; that in
the matter of government "there is no one to whom the term
'chief,' or even head of the tribe, can be properly applied; but
on the other hand there are certain of the elder men, the heads
of local groups, who, at any great ceremonial gathering . . .
take the lead and superintend matters. They form, as it were,
an inner council or cabinet and completely control everything.""
The local headmen of totemic groups normally receive their
office by heredity; but the office is concerned chiefly with seeing
to the performance of totemic ceremonies. "In all of the tribes
there is a division into local groups, which occupy certain well-
defined areas within the tribal territory. There is no such
thing as one man being regarded as the owner of any tract of
The Origin of Totemism, J. G. Frazer, in Fortnightly Review, Vol. 71^
p. 648.
7 Id., pp. 1012 ff, Mr. Frazer's Theory of Totemism.
8 N. T.2, Chap. XXIII, csp. p. 635.
ON. T.2, 20, 21.
WONDER IN CENTRAL A USTBALIAN BELIEF AND STOBY. 139
country. In every case the unit of division is the local totemic
group. "^° Descent is reckoned in some tribes by maternal, in
others by paternal, rule. The marriage customs vary from in-
dividual marriage to what amounts to group marriages at cer-
tain times.^^
In turning to speak of the general religious conditions, it
is to be noted that those tendencies of mental operation already
noticed as working rather against, than for, wonder, will prob-
ably be found to exist with peculiar force among a people so
low in the economic scale as the details just given have indi-
cated. Among them, indeed, there is to be met no conception
of an unexceptional regularity; spirits of ancestors are as com-
mon as men and women, or dogs and trees; they can conceive
of no natural impossibility; their curiosity passes into a crude
imagination, severely dominated by a narrow field of conscious-
ness and the materials of the past, instead of into a discriminat-
ing reflection; credulity and belief are among them as bigoted
under authority as conceivable, or as their incredulity and dis-
belief are under the absence of authority; magic is their "sci-
ence," practised to a certain extent by everyone. In a word,
as being among the lowest of races, these Australian tribes
represent in greatest degree the activity of all those tendencies
which, making against wonder, have been ascribed to primitive
man. One has but to read the pages of Howitt and Spencer-
Gillen in order to give ready assent to these matters. The more
important task is to inquire how far operative are those contrary
tendencies that are friendly to the beginnings and development
of wonder. In the directions from which the previous chapter
has taught us to look for manifestations of wonder, is there any-
thing to be observed ; or are conditions here so extremely primitive
as to give no hope for the detection of wonder-elements in myth
and legend?
Here, again, there is no necessity for a very extended view;
for in the previous chapter much of the support of the wonder-
making tendencies was dra^\^l from the very works we are now
considering. It is enough to mention those tendencies again
10 N. T.2, 27. See, further, Chap. III.
11 N. T.2, 141.
140 STUDIES IN THE MABVELLOUS.
and emphasize them briefly by further references to the beliefs
and mental attitudes of these Australian aborigines.
The universal belief in spirit ancestors was mentioned a
moment ago. Certain peculiarities connected with this belief
must now be noticed. It appears that the common belief is in
a great body of spirit individuals who were derived from totemic
ancestors and are constantly undergoing reincarnation. These
totemic ancestors are in themselves strange creatures and of
extraordinary powers; they will be discussed when the legends
are taken up. At present, it must be stated that the ancestors
appear far more marvellous than the spirits they left at various,
centers; the latter, indeed, are nothing more than the concep-
tion of the 'life' of the individual passing on from one incarna-
tion to another, and as such the spirit is as actual a part of
the body as an arm or leg, and far more necessary. Aitiological
these spirits may even be called, since they explain the phenom-
ena of procreation, as was seen above in the quotation from
Frazer, and explicate the mystery of the origin of man. "In
the Warramunga tribe the women are very careful not to strike
the trunks of certain trees with an axe, because the blow might
cause spirit children to emanate from them and enter their
bodies. They imagine that the spirit is very minute, — about,
the size of a small grain of sand, — and that it enters the woman
through the navel and grows within her into the child. "^- The-
Arunta leave a small depression on one side of the burial mound
in order that the spirit may pass in and out to visit the body.^'
Upon the death of a man his spirit, which the Urabunna then
call kumpira, goes back to the place where it was originally
left by the totemic ancestor. There it may remain for some-
time; but sooner or later it is reincarnated." Occasionally the
spirit can be heard making a low kind of whistling sound."'
The Binbinga believe that both men and women can see the
spirit children at the mungai spots.^" Moreover, it is to be sur-
mised that among all the tribes the only reason that would be:
12 N. T.2, 331.
13 N. T.2, 506.
14 N. T.2, 148.
" Ibid., 530.
^^Ibid., 171.
WONDER IN CENTRAL AUSTRALIAN BELIEF AND STORY. 141
put forward for the invisibility of the spirits would be their
minuteness. A small grain of sand passing quickly from a tree
or a rock into a woman's navel could be seen only with the
greatest difficulty/^ Other details might be added, which would
still further indicate the truth of the conclusion to be dra^vn
from those we have mentioned. The universality of the spirits,
their commonness, their scientific or aitiological aspect, the perfect
and matter-of-fact belief in them, the materialistic conception : all
these suggest nothing of wonder; while the possible visibility of
the grain-like 'soul' deprives us of even that hopeful source of
mystery — invisibility.
There are, how^ever, certain specialized spirits that promise
far more for wonder. These special spirits are not subject
to reincarnation, nor are their form and size undifferen-
tiated and minute as a grain of sand. Rather, they have the
appearance of men, and possess often the power of making
medicine-men. They practically amount to Alcheringa men,
and possess all the extraordinary powers usually attributed to
such. Among the Warramunga a spirit called puntidir, who
lives out in the Mulga scrub, is said to make medicine-men.
Two puntidirs, for instance, after killing (by magic) a sleeping
native, "cut him open and took all his insides out, providing
him, however, with a new set, and finally, they put a little
snake inside his body, which endowed him with the powers
of a medicine-man."^^ Among the Arunta the same kind of
spirit individuals are called iruntarinia}^ "In the Binbinga
tribe the doctors are supposed to be made by the spirits, who are
called Mundadji and Munkaninji, father and son." A story
is told of how the old Mundaji caught a native by the neck,
killed him, "cut him open, right down the middle line, took
out all his insides and exchanged them for those of himself. . . .
. . . At the same time he put a number of sacred stones in his
body. After it was all over, Munkaninji came up and restored
him to life, told him that he was now a medicine-man, and
17 For further examples, see N. T.2, 145, 150, 162, 163, 169, 170, 258,
330, 421, 430, 431, 450, 451, 505, 513, 519, 527.
18 N. T.2, 484. For Alcheringa, see below, p. 152.
10 For a full description, see N. T.i {■= Native Tribes of Central Aus-
tralia), Chap. XV.
142 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS.
showed him how to extract bones and other forms of evil magic
out of men. Then he took him away up into the sky and brought
him down to cartli close to his own camp, where he heard the
natives mourning for him, thinking he was dead. For a long
time he remained in a more or less dazed condition, but grad-
ually he recovered and the natives knew that he had been made
into a medicine-man. When he operates, the spirit of IMunkan-
inji is supposed to be near at hand watching him, unseen of
course by ordinary people. "-'' Now everything here points to
a development of wonder. The specialization in itself would
suggest it ; the extraordinary powers, the spirit being considered
as a great source of magical power and capable of bringing the
dead to life, carrying the individual up into the sky, etc., would
further indicate it ; the esoteric nature of the experience, and the
alliance of the spirit with the mysterious medicine-man, would
render the presence of wonder more than probable ; the obviously
trance-like condition under which the subject sees the spirit,
and the strong air of deceptive exaggeration in the tale of the
whole encounter as set forth by the self-interested doctor, would
beyond doubt win a gaping wonder from the crowd ; and, finally,
quite in line with our previous observations, these spirits, as
associated in the popular consciousness with mystery, are, un-
like the others noted above, held to be invisible save to the spe-
cially and wonderfully initiated.
From spirits it is a short step to gods. Have these tribes
any conception of an All-Father, as Dr. Lang would like to
believe; or of any sort of a deity? What Howitt has to say
upon the matter has already been quoted. He can find no
grounds for assigning to the tribes of southeast Australia any
conception of divinity, but remarks upon the difficulty with
which a modern mind avoids attributing a sense of deity to
IMungan, Nurrundere, Baiame, Daramulun, and the like, who
are all spiritual idealizations of those great and ancient head-
men who, with extraordinary powers, created man and formed
the features of the landscape.-^ These beings, supposed to
20 N. T.2, 487. See also pp. 488, 501, 502.
21 Howitt, op. cit., pp. 488 ff.
WONDER IN CENTRAL A USTRALIAN BELIEF AND STORY. 143
be still existing as spirits, seem to be practically identical
with the totemic ancestors of the tribes visited by Spencer and
Gillen. Of these, those authors remark : "In connection with
their totemic ancestors it may be said that there is apparently
no indication of the development of beliefs which might lead
ultimately to the association with one or other of them of spe-
cial attributes resulting in their finally being regarded in the
light of deities."-- Short of deity, however, there are to be
met certain particular spirits that may well be mentioned here.
In the Arunta tribe there are mischievous spirits called Oruntja,
whom the natives fear, — especially during the night-time. They
are in the habit of snatching lonely wanderers and carrying
them off underground. Twanyirika is another Arunta-made
spirit; he is used for terrifying the women and children. At-
natu, of the Kaitish tribe, has more definite characteristics : a
very great man; with a very black face; with no anus; self-
made a very great while ago, even before the Old Time; the
maker, indeed, of that Old Time or Alcheringa, and of every-
thing that the blackfellow has. There are various tales about
him. The Binbinga, in addition to the Mundadji mentioned
in the last paragraph, believe in a friendly spirit, Ulurkura,
who lives in the woods and rescues men from the clutches of
the Mundadji. Only medicine-men can see him. The Mara
have a similar spirit whom they call Mumpani. Now, all these
spirits, including those that, like Twanyirika, are mere bogies
to frighten the women and children, are specializations to be
compared with the spirits that make the doctors; and as such
they undoubtedly count toward wonder. But Avhether or not
they are actually provocative of wonder, remains a question.
There is not about them, with the exception of Atnatu, that
fullness of wonderful tale and adventure, that exaggeration and
individuality, which characterize the spirits. What is certain,
however, is that none of them possesses the moral, cultural, or
propitiatory characters of a supreme being.-^
There can be, then, no differentiation of a priestly office.
The nearest to that is the company of elders who direct the ini-
"•- N. T.-, 496.
23 See N. T.2, Chap. XVI.
144 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS.
tiation and totemic ceremonies; but they possess none of the
priestly powers or characteristics.
The magician, however, reigns supreme. His power is care-
fully segregated from the common magic; his office is hedged
mightily with mystery. The article of M. ]\Iauss, the most ex-
haustive upon the subject, has already been mentioned;-* and
the abstracts from Spencer-Gillen given a few paragraphs back
represent one method of initiation into that office. All medicine-
men are "supposed to have had stones or other objects placed
in their bodies by certain spirit individuals, and by virtue of
them they can counteract, to a greater or less extent, the evil
magic to which any bodily pain is always attributed."-^ Their
power is, with one or two exceptions, wholly curative and bene-
ficial. The recital of one or two more instances of initiation
will clearly show the mystery and wonder of the making of
medicine-men. Sometimes they are made by other medicine-
men, instead of by Iruntarinia as above. "A celebrated med-
icine-man named Ilpailurkna, a member of the Unmatjera tribe,
told us that, when he was made into a medicine-man, a very
old doctor came one day and threw some of his atnongara stones
at him with a spear-thrower. Some hit him on the chest, others
went right through his liead, from ear to ear, killing him. The old
man then cut out all his insides, intestines, liver, heart, lungs —
everything in fact, and left him lying all night long on the ground.
In the morning the old man came and looked at him and placed
some more atnongara stones inside his body and in his arms
and legs, and covered over his face with leaves. Then he sang
over him until his body was all swollen up. When this was so
he provided him with a complete set of new inside parts, placed
a lot more atnongara stones in him, and patted him upon the
head, which caused him to jump up alive. The old medicine-
man then made him drink water and eat meat containing atnon-
gara stones. When he awoke he had no idea as to where he
was, and said, 'Tju, tju, tju' — 'I think I am lost.' But when
he looked around he saw the old medicine-man standing beside
24 See above, p. 127, note 87.
25 N. T.2, 479.
WONDEB IN CENTRAL A USTEALIAN BELIEF AND STORY. 145
liim, and the old man said, 'No, you are not lost; I killed you
a long time ago.' Ilpailurkna had completely forgotten who he
was and all about his past life. After a time the old man led
him back to his camp and showed it to him, and told him that
the woman there was his lubra, for he had forgotten all about
her. His coming back in this way and his strange behavior at
once showed the other natives that he had been made into a
medicine-man, ' '^*'
It will be noticed that this story does not differ materially
from the one quoted above where Mundadji and ]\Iunkaninji
made a medicine-man in the Binbinga tribe, except in the fact
that where the operators in that case were spirits, the operator
here is represented as "a very old doctor." Among the War-
ramunga tribe the making of medicine-men by old practitioners
from the neighboring Worgaia tribe is one of the most secret
of their customs. But the similarity of the tales, in spite of
the difference of the agents, is remarkable, and indicates a long
tradition and jejune custom^'^ within which the imagination
moves only in exaggeration of certain well-known and long-
used properties. The killing, slitting, deprivation of entrails,
placing of magical stones within the body together with new
entrails, the strange awakening and weird return to camp, are
properties recurring again and again in stories throughout the
region explored. What was the original reason for the stone
detail can only be conjectured. It may have had some reference
to the sensations of the wizard when under neuropathic con-
ditions; or the stones may have been regarded as powerful
through association with sacred spots, such as the oknanikilla,
where the totemic ancestors went into the ground, leaving their
spirit parts behind them; but more probably it was the mere
handiness to the imagination of stones to represent the material-
istic conception of magic power. Among the Arunta we have
seen that a snake was used in place of stones.-** This explana-
20 N. T.2, 480.
27 Especially in view of the wide ilistribution of the tales throughout
tribes that for years have had little or no communication. This would
imply an antiquity of the tales equal to that of the original distribution
of the tribes.
28 Cf. also the Jcupitja, and the Irman, N. T.2, 484-5.
146 STUDIES IN THE MABFELLOUS.
tion is on a par with the materialistic conception of all disease
and illness as an affection to be got rid of by the supposed
removal of some object, a small stick or stone, from the body
of the patient. The magical power of the medicine-man was
probably regarded as only a particular kind of bodily affection
or disease, as it were; and his stones were only the particular
stones that caused those peculiar affections. Again, the origin
of the detail of disemboweling rests in conjecture, and must
have had a beginning equally simple and commonplace with
that of the atnongara. The strange awakening and return
seem clearly the product of sensation-experiences, probably
neuropathic. But, w^hatever the origin of such details in a re-
mote antiquity, before the various tribes had branched off from
a parent stock, their present state reveals all the mystery of
arbitrary and inexplicable power that alwaj^s characterizes
the mummeries of magic, whether in the wilds of Africa, the
fairs of the middle ages, or the seances of modern spiritualism.
The following case from the Arunta well illustrates the
deceptive accessories of the magic-man. From such deception
springs a fearful belief in another's magical power, although
the individual believer is aware of his own impotence, — a state
of belief distinctly favorable to the wonderful, as has previously
been remarked.-" When any man of the Arunta tribe feels that he
may become a wizard, he goes alone to a cave where the Irunta-
rinia are supposed to dwell. "Here, with considerable trepida-
tion, he lies down to sleep, not venturing to go inside, or else
he would, instead of becoming endowed with magic power, be
spirited away forever. At break of day, one of the Iruntarinm
comes to the mouth of the cave, and, finding the man asleep,
throws at him an invisible lance which pierces the neck from
behind, passes through the tongue, making therein a large hole,
and then comes out through the mouth. The tongue remains
throughout life perforated in the center with a hole large enough
to admit the little finger; and when all is over, this hole is the
only visible and outward sign of the treatment of the Iruntar-
inia. How the hole is really made it is impossible to saj^ but
as shown in the illustration it is always present in the genuine
20 See above, p. 129.
WONDEB IN CENTRAL AUSTRALIAN BELIEF AND STOBY. 147
medicine-man. In some way of course the novice must make it
himself; but naturally no one will ever admit the fact, indeed
it is not impossible that, in the course of time, the man really
comes to believe that it was not done by himself. A second
lance thrown by the Iruntarinia pierces the head from ear to
ear, and the victim falls dead and is at once carried into the
depths of the cave. . . . Within the cave the Iruntarinia
removes all the internal organs and provides the man with a
completely new set, after which operation has been successfully
performed he presently comes to life again, but in a condition
of insanity. {Ainongara stones are also placed in his body by
the spirit.) — This (the insanity) does not last long, and when
he has recovered to a certain extent the Iruntarinia, who is
invisible except to a few highly gifted medicine-men and also
to the dogs, leads him back to his own people. The spirit then
returns to the cave, but for several days the man remains more
or less strange in his appearance and behaviour until one morn-
ing it is noticed that he has painted with powdered charcoal
and fat a broad band across the bridge of his nose. All signs
of insanity have disappeared, and it is at once recognized that
a new medicine-man has graduated. According to etiquette he
must not practise his profession for about a year, and if during
this time of probation the hole in the tongue closes up, as it
sometimes does, then he will consider that his virtues as a med-
icine-man have departed, and he will not practise at all. ]\Iean-
while, he dwells upon his experiences, doubtless persuading
himself that he has actually passed through those which are
recognised as accompanying the making of a medicine-man by
the Iruntarinia, and at the same time he cultivates the acquain-
tance of other medicine-men, and learns from them the secrets
of the craft, which consist principally in the ability to hide
about his person and produce at will small quartz pebbles or
bits of stick; and, of hardly less importance than this sleight-
of-hand, the power of looking preternaturally solemn, as if he
were the possessor of knowledge quite hidden from ordinary
men. "30
SON. T.i, 523-525.
148 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS.
Deception and exaggeration go hand in hand: and the de-
ceptive character of the magician is no more evident in this
story than is the habit of exaggerating details in order to win
popidar regard. A word further may be hazarded upon this
subject. AVhik^ the power of magic by itself is not yet a matter
of wonder to the aborigines, who all possess some degree of it,'^
the magician is distinguished by his superior endowment in mag-
ical lore and ability, as well as by the mysterious methods
undertaken to secure the endowment. The power is not different
in kind, but exaggerated in degree; and the consciousness of
his exaggerated position continually dictates to the magician a
course of deceit and mendacity calculated to heighten still
further his position in popular superstition. From this fertile
field arises the wonder of these Australian medicine-men. It
is hardly right to look for examples of this wonder in the
pseudo-medical acti\aties of the doctors, inasmuch as their prac-
tices of pretending to remove twigs from the bodies of their
patients are the commonly acknowledged materia medica of the
tribe; but it is entirely proper to insist that only the doctors
possess this curative power, and that, while having presumably
gained it through mysterious and awful methods, they are ex-
tremely careful to surround the exercise of the power with all
the exaggeration of ceremony and hocus-pocus that will impress
the ignorant with a sense of strange and extraordinary condi-
tions. One of the most valuable of the mysterious accessories
is the kupitja, a small object worn through the nose by the
medicine-men of the Warramunga tribe. Spencer and Gillen
say that "the most profound mystery attaches to this innocent-
looking little article. "^^ "No young medicine-man to whom
one of them has been given would ever dream of conducting an
investigation into its structure. He implicitly believes the old
man, who tells him that it was made in the Alcheringa and is
full of magic power. "^^ In serious cases a great deal is made
of these instruments, which are supposed to counteract the evil
magic resident in the patient by being projected into his body.
31 See, e.g., N. T.2, Chap. XIV, p. 456; N. T.i, 530, 534 flF.
32 N. T.2, 485.
33 N. T.2, 484, note.
WONDEB IN CENTEAL A VSTEALIAN BELIEF AND STOEY. 149
The old Worgaia-man who makes them is fully aware of the
exaggerated importance and sanctity to be gained by his pos-
session of the Icupitjas, and steadfastly refused to confess his
authorship. He persisted in claiming that they were made in
the Alcheringa * ' by some very powerful old snakes. ' '^* Extraor-
dinary as the magicians' powers may appear, however, the belief
of the natives in their reality and efficacy is perfect. Examples of
this recur again and again : and were it not for the tremendous
insistence upon the extraordinary character of the magicians'
powers, which overbalances the wonder-destroying power of abso-
lute belief ; were it not for the careful exaggeration of the rarity
of their office and endowments, the wonder of these magical prac-
tices might well sink beneath the chilling effect of a matter-of-
fact belief. The whole set of circumstances is well illustrated
by the following picture from the Arunta tribe. "In serious
cases the action is more dramatic, and the medicine-man needs
a clear space in which to perform. The patient, perhaps too
ill to sit up, is supported by some individual, while the medicine-
man who has been called in and may have come a long distance,
gravely examines him and consults with other practitioners who
may be present. . . . The diagnosis may occupy some time,
during which everyone maintains a very solemn appearance, all
conversation being carried on in whispers. As a result the
medicine-man will perhaps pronounce that the sick man is suf-
fering from a charmed bone inserted by a magic individual,
such as a Kurdaitcha; or perhaps, worse still, the verdict is
that one of the Iruntarinia has placed in his body an Ullinka
or short barbed stick attached to an invisible string, the pulling
of which, by the malicious spirit, causes great pain. If the latter
be the case it requires the greatest skill of a renowned medicine-
man to effect a cure. While a patient is supported in a half-
sitting attitude, the medicine-man will first of all stand close
by, gazing down upon him in the most intent way. Then sud-
denly he will go some yards off, and looking fiercely at him will
bend slightly forwards and repeatedly jerk his arms outwards
at full length, with the hand outstretched, the object being to
thereby project some of the Atnongara stones into the patient's
34 N. T.2, 486.
150 STUDIES IN TEE MAEFELLOUS.
body, the object of this being to counteract the evil influence
at work within the latter. Going rapidly and with a character-
istic high-knee action from one end of the cleared space to the
other he repeats the movement with dramatic action. Finally,
he comes close again, and, after much mysterious searching,
finds and cuts the string which is invisible to every one except
himself. There is not a doubt among the onlookers as to his
having really done this. Then once more the projecting of the
Atnongara stones takes place, and crouching down over the sick
man lie places his mouth upon the affected part and sucks, until
at last either in fragments or, very rarely, and only if he be a
very distinguished medicine man, the Ullinka is extracted whole
and shown to the wondering onlookers, the Atnongara stones
returning, unseen, once more into his own body. "^^
The deceit and exaggeration, the mysterious accessories of
the art and the wondering credulity of the onlookers, are all
represented here. Among the other exaggerated powers of the
magicians the following may be noted briefly. The Mungaberra
attribute special powers to the magicians, such as ability to
transform themselves into eagle-hawks, and, thus disguised,
travel long distances during the night.'^" In many of the tribes
the magician is able to affect a whole group of men and women
with disease, or to discover the individual who is responsible
for the death of any native.^^ The Mara medicine-man possesses
the power "of climbing at night-time by means of a rope, invis-
ible to ordinary mortals, into the sky, where he can hold con-
verse with the star people."^® Howitt''^ mentions other powers,
such as rain-making, clairvoyance, spirit-mediumship, enchant-
ment by song, etc., etc.
It is now evident that, among the forces counting for wonder,
the belief in spirits, or the animistic force, tends to produce
wonder only in the case of the special spirits segregated from
■•■■• X. T.i, .0.31-2. Cf. Ilowitt, 386-387.
36 N. T.i, 533. Cf. Ilowitt, 374, 388.
37 N. T.I, 532, 533.
38 N. T.2, 488. Cf. Howitt, 359.
soHowitt, Chap. VII.
WONDER IN CENTRAL A USTRALIAN BELIEF AND STORY. 151
the great reincarnating mass; that in the absence of definitely
conceived gods we may turn only to these particular spirits for
a sign of that wonder usually attributed to the god. That the
magician, furthermore, offers the example of the most powerful
of the forces making for wonder, is clearly seen by his segre-
gated character, mysterious initiation, extraordinary powers,
practice of deceit and exaggeration, and by the popular rever-
ence extended to him.
With the completion of this preliminary view it is conven-
ient to pass directly to an examination of the totemistic legends
collected by Spencer and Gillen in their second volume.*" A
great part of these traditions consists of the sort of details just
discussed under the aspects of spirit and magician. These very
tales, indeed, are the sources which furnish the data for those
aspects. No further discussion along those lines will be neces-
sary.*^ But closely related to the totemic ancestor, and so lead-
ing us to a view of the relations between wonder and that most
important and puzzling of primitive customs, the totem, is a
further mass of details which must now be investigated.
The great similarity of all the legends renders possible the
selection of a typical story, which may be prefixed to the enu-
meration of the details. Here is the tradition of the origin of
the Unmatjera as gathered from their own lips, but told in
the words of the collector. ' ' In the Alcheringa an old crow man
sat down at Ungurla by the side of what is now called the "Wood-
forde River. He arose at first from a Churinga, and when he
came out he looked at himself and said, 'I think that I must be a
hawk; but no — I am too black.' Then he thought that he was
an eagle-hawk, but decided that he had too much wing; then
he looked at his arms, out of which black feathers had sprouted,
and said, 'I am a crow.' When the sun shone he sat out on the
40 N. T.2, Chap. XIII.
41 The following referencos to spirit and magic in the legends may be
appended: Spirits, N. T.2, 396, 417, 421, 435. 445, 450; special individ-
uals who can see them, 450-451; reincarnation, 404, 419, 450; Atnatu, 420;
spirit-children, 423, 426. 428, 431, 438, 441, 444, 450; sacredness of the
Nanja, 448. Magic, 396, 428; as ordinary power, 456, 466, 477; rain-
maker, 393; magic-song, 421, 443; power of the left hand, 425, 426, 428;
pointing-sticks, 433; regarded with awe, 462.
152 STUDIES IN THE MABVELLOUS.
top of a hill wanning himself, and when it set he went back to
his Churinga camp and slept there. One day he saw, far away
in the distance, a lot of inmintera — that is, incomplete men
and women — belonging to the Unmatjera tribe. He decided to
go over and make them into men and women. He did this by
means of his beak, and then returned to his camp and there
made a Churinga lelira, a sacred stone knife, with which he
intended to come back and circumcise them. Meanwhile, how-
ever, two old Parenthie lizard men had come up from far awaj''
to the south, and, with their teeth, they both circumcised and
subincised the men, and performed the operation of atna-ariltha-
kuyna upon the women. When the old crow had got his lelira
ready and was just about to start, he looked out and saw that
the two Parenthies had been before him, and so as there was
nothing further for him to do, he stayed at Ungwurla, and there
he died. A big black stone marks the spot, and in the ertnata-
lunga there his lelira is kept, as well as a number of stones
which are Churinga, and represent the eggs which he used to
void in the place of the usual excrement. ' '*^
Our observations may well take the form of a commentary
upon the extraordinary details of this legend. Let it be first
noticed that the phrase "In the Alcheringa," or its equivalents,
*'In the Wingara," "In the Mungai time," is the usual begin-
ning phrase, the "once-upon-a-time" of these stories. The Al-
cheringa, or Wingara, or Mungai, is the far past, or dream-
time,*^ in which the totemic ancestors lived. There is, then, the
recognition of a temporal remoteness in which beginnings began ;
and about such a word and its content there would seem at first
glance to cling something of the aroma of wonder and day of
faery that haunt our own conceptions of primal times. Certain
it is that the Central Australian regards the Alcheringa as a
time of greater character than the present, as a time distin-
guished by the play of extraordinary power and happenings.
". . . it may be remarked," write our authors, "that the
further we pass back from the present towards the Alcheringa
times, the greater are the powers supposed to have been wielded
42 N. T.2, 399.
^^ Alchcri means dream.
WON DEE IN CENTEAL A USTBALIAN BELIEF AND STORY. 153
by the members of the totem."** Such a conception, however,
is nothing more than the simple result of that very first of
exaggeration's activities by which the contents of the past per-
petually undergo an enlargement of figure and idealization of
power. The very next words of the passage referred to indicate
that this simplicity of character does indeed attach to the con-
ception. "Every native has a great respect for his kankwia
or grandfather, and imagines him to have been a far greater
man than he himself is, while his kankivia's kankivia is propor-
tionately greater still; in fact we may say that the virtues and
powers of various kinds attributed to any ancestor increase in
geometric proportion as we pass backwards towards the Alche-
ringa. "*^ But such simple exaggeration is quite other than our
own conception of the Beginning; our wider consciousness and
sad sophistication in the limitation of human life and power
mutually assist to enchant the primal day with the fascination
of a great freedom, of a Golden Age, or of a Garden of Eden
where Jahve walks with man in the cool of the evening. The
narrow consciousness of the Arunta and Unmatjera, in the want
of such complex endowment, must take the phrase "In the Al-
cheringa" with far less of enticing strangeness. Nor does the
appellation dream-time indicate the contrary; for dreams to
them are material realities.*^ Finally, both the commonness of
the phrase, taken side by side with a mental sluggishness and
indifference, and also the full and matter-of-fact belief in such
a time, so that "It happened in the Alcheringa" is sufficient
answer to any objection as to possibility,*^ must serve as numb-
ing tendencies to the simple sense of wonder that is stirred in
the minds of the aborigines by this naive exaggeration of the
virtue of the past.
But whatever may be the vagueness of the wonder-conscious-
ness as touching the Alcheringa in the abstract, it is beyond con-
troversy that the ancestors who arose in that dimness of time are
depicted and regarded as men of extraordinary powers. "The
44 N. T.2, 277.
4B N. T.2, 277.
46 N. T.2, 451.
4TN. T.i, 137.
154 STUDIES IN THE MAIIVELLOVS.
Central Australian native," Spencer and Gillen remark, "is
firmly convinced, as will be seen from the accounts relating to
their Alcheringa ancestors, that the latter were endowed with
powers such as no living man now possesses. They could travel
underground or mount into the sky, and could make creeks or
water-courses, mountain ranges, sand-hills and plains."*^ These
powers are not illustrated in the legend given above, but it is
easy to choose cases from the great number furnished in the
other traditions of the collection. The Ertwaininga women of
the Unmatjera, when frightened, went down into the ground
and traveled on out of sight;'"' the ancestors of the emu totem
of the Kaitish "dived down into the ground and came up at
Burnia, a long way off, where there is a soakage. "'^'^ Moreover,
the ancestor usually arises in the first place from the earth or
rocks, or from some water-hole, and goes down into the same
at the end.^^ Among the Arunta they arise, as in the legend
cited above, from Churinga.^^ Going up into the sky is a power
especially attached to flying totemic ancestors, such as the flying-
fox and the white cockatoo ;^^ although occasionally the wind
catches up the ancestor and sends him to heaven.''* The making
of natural features of the landscape was one of the duties, it
might be said, of the Alcheringa individuals. "Close to what
is now called Powell Creek is a small water-course, made in the
Alcheringa by an old Thamungala (a frilled lizard) man who
spent his time there performing ceremonies. A number of men
of the Thaballa (laughing boy) Totem came from Lamara, and
hunted the old lizard away. As he travelled on he made Powell
Creek, and the course of the stream as it flows away northwards
marks the line of retreat."" Two wildcat men made creeks by
cutting the ground with their knives;^" the snake-man made
<8N. T.2, 490.
49 N. T.2, 403.
60 Ibid., 415.
Bi Ibid., 395, 396, 400, 414, 429, 431, 433, 440, 441, etc.
62 Ibid., 399.
63 /bid., 428, 424.
6* Ibid., 444.
65 N. T.2, 423.
60 Ibid., 424, 425.
WONDER IN CENTRAL AUSTRALIAN BELIEF AND STORY. 155
many creeks as he traveled.^^ With these cases may be grouped
the multitude of examples of the rise of a hill, or mountain
range, or pile of rocks, or trees, to mark the place of some Al-
cheringa event, such as the place where the ancestor appeared
or disappeared, held ceremonies, or performed other striking
acts. A pelican burned up a duck man's camp, and a heap of
stones arose to mark the spot;^^ a great gum-tree arose to mark
the spot where another ancestor died;^" a hill marks the place
where an emu man was killed.''**
Now it is at once apparent that there are two sorts of details
in these examples. There is the detail that is distinctly indi-
vidual in its characterization; it may be called the 'heroic'
detail: such is the power of traveling underground, or up into
the sky. There is also the detail of causation, or the aitiological
detail, as it is usually called: such are the making of creeks and
the raising of mountains, rocks, etc. — Both sorts are extraor-
dinary: are they wonderful to the Central Australian? This
must now be decided.
Of the first, then, first ! Traveling underground is certainly
a feat not indulged in by the native ; unless, as he might believe,
by the great magician, — and that would make for wonder im-
mediately. Indubitably such power is a rarity even in the con-
sciousness of an Australian. Has he any explanation? Of
course ! It was in the Alcheringa ! — a vague, but to him per-
fectly satisfactory answer. The rarity remains after the ex-
planation is given, — which is the condition of the second of the
six cases of rarity. Wonder, therefore, if present at all, is
doomed to decay and extinction.^^ But the absence of any idea
of unexceptional regularity takes away the real mental vividness
of the rarity itself ; and there is left only the somewhat indiffer-
ent realization of a rarity by a narrow consciousness that finds
some difficulty in fixing its attention steadily upon the remote
conditions of the Alcheringa. Thus, the sense of wonder is ren-
dered still more precarious. Add to this the perfect belief to
57 Ibid., 432. Cf. 436, 438, 440.
68 /bid., 434.
f'^Ihid., 398.
60 Ibid.. 394. Cf. 395, 396. 397, 398, 400, 405, 408, 414, 419, 420, 426.
61 See above, p. 63.
156 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS.
which Spencer and Gillen testify above;*'- and the common con-
ception of the powers of one 's ancestors as increasing from one 's
grandfather to great-grandfather, and so on, as time grows more
remote,"^ — add these, and, in spite of the rarity in experience of
this underground traveling, the wonder of it in the primitive
Weltanschauung glimmers but feebly, if at all. Finally, it is
not, perhaps, out of place to suggest that the belief is easily
motived by the dog-holes with which the native is familiar, and
of which he sometimes takes advantage for shelter. The most
that can be said, then, is that there is here, perhaps, a feeble
inclination to wonder.
JMounting into the skies is another 'heroic' power which
may be regarded in practically the same light as traveling un-
derground. For the same reasons its wonder-value to the Aus-
tralian is, doubtless, rather insignificant, — a beginning cer-
tainly; but only a faint beginning. It has been pointed out,
however, that this is a power often claimed by the magicians.®*
This circumstance, unless counterbalanced by the winged char-
acter of the totem-animal mentioned in the illustration above,
might serve to bring a remote character more vividly to present
attention. Finally, whether or not these two powers are con-
sidered cases of magic, I cannot say. There is not sufficient
evidence to allow a conclusion.
Of the aitiologieal details it may be necessary to speak a
trifle more carefully. The origin of these details lies in the
desire to explain the 'how' of natural phenomena; these phe-
nomena, and not the ancestors, are to be regarded as the stimuli
of the legends. Around the ancestors as a convenient nexus
and adequate explanation grew up the mass of aitiologieal mate-
rial, extending the ancestors' wanderings, increasing their vir-
tues, and multiplying their avocations. The extraordinary
necessity and an extraordinary power existed side by side in
the consciousness of the simple savage: a power greater than
his was needed to make mountain and river; his ancestors pos-
sessed such power by virtue of his own natural exaggeration of
62 See above, p. 154.
63 See above, p. 153.
64 See above, p. 150, and note 38.
WONDER IN CENTRAL A USTEALIAN BELIEF AND STORY. 157
the remote; the association of the two was inevitable, and the
mental association was conceived as objective cause and effect.
The process is the same that w^e have seen underlying the prac-
tice of magic, the same mistaking of subjective contiguity for
objective relation.
But it must be emphasized that no actual wonder attends this
process.^^ When it is said that the savage wonders as to the
^how' of mountain and stream, the only wonder really meant
is that sort of wonder that is merely another name for a rather
idle curiosity; the double use of the word 'Svonder" itself has
in this case been responsible for that common idea of the savage
whereby he appears surrounded by a halo of religious or meta-
physical wonder at the marvels of creation. We come by the
mistake, quite respectably, quite eminently, from ancient phil-
osophy. "For from wonder men, both now and at the first,
began to philosophize, having felt astonishment originally at the
things which were more obvious, indeed, among those that were
doubtful," says Aristotle.^® But there is no metaphysical phil-
osophizing among the Arunta and Kaitish ; there is no long and
arduously concentrated and discriminating attention, intelli-
gently, critically focused upon the 'how' of nature. Instead,
there is the utterly uncritical, momentary experience of mental
association childishly erected into a story. It is indeed the
■* science' of the savage, the weakly imaginative, narrowly con-
ceived answer to a question barely put. But whether we use
the word wonder in its looser sense of idle curiosity', or in its
stricter meaning of a puzzlement of intelligence, in either sense
there can be ascribed to these aitiological details no significance
in wonder. It is only when the light of a completer knowledge
begins to break, as we have seen it breaking among the early
Greek philosophers, that these extraordinary powers, originally
bound up with the matter-of-fact ' science ' of primitive mind, are
regarded as wonderful, because at last recognized as impossible.
Belief lasting longer than 'science,' the earlier 'science' becomes
a marvel! Thus, too, is it to-day, bringing the matter home, in
05 For the exaggeration of aitiological detail to the point of wonder, see
below, p. 169.
&« Metaphysics, I, 2 (Bohn's Lib.)
158 STUDIES IX TEE MARVELLOUS.
the case of Hebrew scripture and its marvels of creation.
But of that another time! It must now be remarked that
the lack of wonder in aitiologieal detail is again seen by the
application of our six typical eases of rarity to the original
point of view, that is to the primitive view that experienced
objective phenomena as a stimulus to observation. In the mul-
titude of cases where some natural object — hill, tree, pile of
rocks, etc. — is said to have arisen to mark a sacred spot, it is
particularly apparent that some more or less slight degree of
rarity has suggested the need of explanation, — has, in other
words, motived the 'story'. For instance, it is said in one
locality that when the old Murunda died and went into the
ground a big stone arose to represent his organs, which were
abnormally developed;®'^ at another place it is told that two
Alcheringa men pulled out their penes and placed them on the
ground, whereupon, in each case, a stone arose to mark the
spot."* Obviously, in both examples, the peculiar shape of the
stone has given rise to the legend. Rarity of size, also, often
motives a tale.®* Clearly we have again the conditions of the
second of the six cases, — that where an actual rarity still re-
mains after the explanation is given. The inference of the pre-
vious paragraph is now only strengthened by the conclusion to be
drawn from these conditions, viz., the decay of wonder. Even if
there could have been, and we believe there could not have been,
any real wonder to begin with, it must speedily have fallen into
desuetude. The 'heroic' detail shows at least an inclination to
wonder ; the aitiologieal detail shows almost an opposition to any
original wonder.
It is now possible, after completing the discussion of the
extraordinary powers of the totemic ancestors, to turn again to
the first, typical illustration and carry our research a step
further. It will be remembered how the old crow man found
difficulty in determining what he was; how he finally hit upon
the crow because of the black feathers which sprouted out of
07 N. T.'-:, .396.
68 Ihid., 440. Cf. 400, 408, 430.
6» Ihid., 398, 433.
WONDER IN CENTRAL A USTRALIAN BELIEF AND STORY. 159
his arms; how he possessed a beak, and yet could think and
talk like a man. It is this extraordinary union of natures and
forms, of man and beast, that must now be examined.
The state of affairs pictured here is very common in the
legends.'^" The majority of ancestors may be said to have under-
gone the trying ordeal of discovering what sort of animals they
were. The solution of the anomalous character which such a
belief presents to our eyes lies in properly emphasizing the fact
that these ancestors were totemic ancestors, and that as such
they were again and again the ancestors of animal totems. Let
us occupy for a moment the point of view of the savage who
finds himself the member of an animal, say the black crow,
totem. Why is this totem, the savage asks, the black crow totem ?
The obvious answer is that the totemic ancestor was a black
crow. But he must have been a man also ! Then he was a man
and a crow too ! In other words, I believe that these details
now under consideration were in origin strictly aitiological.
Primitive man, finding himself a member of an animal totem,
having long since forgotten the reason for the social division,
casts about in his mind for an explanation of the circumstance
and invents the simplest possible 'reason', — a reason that
depends upon nothing else than the juxtaposition in his mind
of man and his totem animal, and issues most irrationally and
naively in the statement "He was a black crow!" Nay, more!
His own state of mind, and almost his very question, are at-
tributed to the ancestor. This naivete of the savage becomes the
psychological character of his forbear. Like his descendant,
the ancestor speculates as to what sort of an animal he is, and
finds out only after several guesses. These characteristics, and
the truth of our interpretation, are well illustrated by the con-
versation of two ancestors, one of whom was Thungalla,^^ the
other Umbitjana." "The Thungalla looked at his shadow
(illinja) and called himself Illinja. At first down grew all
along his arms and hair on his head, and his eyes became big
and stood out like those of the Tittherai bird. The two men
TO See, e.g., N. T.2, 398, 400, 402, 405, 409, 414, 420, 452,
Ti Name of a male class.
72 Name of another male class.
160 STUDIES IN THE MAETELLOUS.
discussed matters, and Umbitjana said to the Thungalla, 'You
aud I sit down little birds', but Thungalla said, 'No, we sit
down blaek-fellows, and we belong to the same country.' Then
he said, 'You have got no father, you are my child, you are
Umbitjana,' and it was decided that Thungalla was an opossum,
because fur had grown on him like that of an opossum, and his.
eyes were prominent, and that Umbitjana was a grass-seed man,
and that his name was Murunda."'^ Here, it will be noted,
after having decided upon their classes, Thungalla and Umbit-
jana, they proceed to decide upon their totems. The Thungalla.
has good reason for determining his animal, but the grass-seed
is attributed to the other without reason, by a sort of primitive
social contract! In another tale, where a man is represented
as arising from the grass-seed, the same attempt at aitiological
detail is shown.''*
The simplicity of the primitive mind could hardly be better
illustrated than by this naive invention; and the very obvious-
ness of that simplicity, whereby, in the lack of such categories
of the animal world as we possess, the savage is able without
any sense of the irrational or impossible to attribute animal
characteristics to his ancestors, shows at once that wonder is
no more to be attached to the origin of this detail than to the
other aitiological details already discussed. There was no crit-
icism based upon a strict classification of the mammalia ; to a
naked, hairy savage, living as naturally as the beasts, a little
opossum fur along his arms was no great thing! Originally, at
the making of the legend, such a detail was not felt as wonderful.
Later, of course, with the growth of a wider knowledge and
keener criticism, such details would become marvels; but the
Central Australian, most primitive of living races, has not yet
reached the culture stage that embraces such knowledge. He
may, indeed, be in advance of the ancestors who framed his;
legends ; and so the road toward wonder may be in the making.
Completed it is not.
It would be an egregious blunder if one of the chief elements
of later wonder, present here in embryo, were passed over in
T3 N. T.2, 409.
'i*Cf. also the legends of the Water-Totcin, Ibid., 418; Laughing-boy-
totem, 422; Wind-totera, 444; Eesin-totem, 444.
WONDER IN CENTRAL A USTEALIAN BELIEF AND STORY. 161
silence. The talking animal is of course one of the most common
of details in wonder-stories. The totemic ancestor is from one
point of a view a man : as such he of course talks as a man.
From another point of view he is an animal, and goes by the
name of that animal. Here, then, is an animal talking, with
the best and clearest of rights to talk ! In some cases the animal
character is still stronger, even overshadowing the human char-
acter.'^^ Obviously that is natural enough, — only a trifle of
difference in emphasis along the same line of aitiological in-
quiry; it militates, however, for a remarkable state of affairs
when centuries later the human character has dropped away,
and there is left only an animal who talks with no good reason
for talking ! There is no intention of implying here that the
entire wonder of talking animals takes its rise in totemic con-
ditions. Probably several other origins will be found also. But
what is claimed is, that in this origin of the talking animal there
is no feeling of that wonder which, through the forgetfulness
and growing sophistication of later ages, comes to be attached
to the circumstance. There is the best of reasons for the talk :
it is a man talking!
Once again attention must be directed to the type-legend
for further comment. The crow-man saw one day a "lot of
inmintera — that is, incomplete men and women — belonging to
the Unmatjera tribe. ' ' He engages in an attempt to make them
perfect. Now these inmintera, or intera-intera, or inapcrtwa,
represent nothing more nor less than one of the primitive attempts
at explaining the origin of man. Sometimes it was the totemic
ancestor who, 'rising' from the ground or Churinga, gave birth
to the men of his totem in various ways, sucli, for instance, as
by throwing crystals out of his body, throwing out his muscles,
or merely by looking at himself;''*' but among the Umnatjera there
exists this peculiar belief in imperfect creatures, whose limbs
were not divided, neither arms, fingers, legs nor toes, whose
noses had to be added and the nostrils bored with fingers, whose
mouths had to be slit open, likewise the eyelids.''^
75 C^, e.g., the Eagle-hawk, N. T.2, 398.
70 N. T.2, 430, 431, 400.
77 N. T.i. 389; N. T.2, 156, 157; cf., also, N. T.2, 152, 154, 161, 149,
150, 345, 399, 403.
162 STUDIES IN THE MABVELLOUS.
It is difficult to speak of these creatures in view of wonder.
Certainly they are aitiological, and the cutting loose of the
limbs, boring of the nostrils, and slitting of the eyes by the old
crow'^ suggest an attempt to account for the human form and
features. Now, inasmuch as all the aitiological details noted
thus far have yielded no original wonder, there is strong pre-
sumption against assuming any original wonder here. I cannot,
however, support that presumption with any evidence, theoret-
ical or empirical. The most I am prepared to assert at present
is, that in view of the greater differentiation of idea and image
involved here over and above the other cases of human origin
from the totemic ancestor, it would seem that the inmintera
would sooner be felt as wonderful than would the animal-char-
acter of the ancestors.
There remains but one other detail in the crow legend that
requires comment, and that is the Churinga. To speak of these
briefly is to fall far short of appreciating their place and
significance in the totem and lives of its members. Spencer and
Gillen in their first volume have devoted a long chapter to the
Churinga;^'' from the material there presented the present notes
for our purpose are roughly put together. The term Churinga
is applied chiefly to "rounded, oval or elongate, flattened stones
and slabs of wood of various sizes"; the smaller ones are com-
monly called bull-roarers. Considerable mystery is attached to
them, partly, no doubt, in order to impress the women and boys,
who are never under any condition allowed to see them. "From
time immemorial myths and superstitions have grown up around
them, until now it is difficult to say how far each individual
believes in what ... he must know to be more or less of
a fraud, but in which he implicitly thinks the other natives
believe." "Especially in connection with the Churinga, there
are amongst the Australian natives beliefs which can have had no
origin in fact, but which have gradually grown up until now
they are implicitly held." In the Alcheringa, each ancestor,
"« N. T.2, 1.57. Sometimes two creatures who lived in the western sky
performed the operation. See N. T.2, 150.
79 N. T.i, Chap. V.
WONDEB IN CENTRAL AUSTRALIAN BELIEF AND STORY. 163
according to the Arunta and certain other tribes, was closely
bound up with his Churinga. With the Churinga the spirit-
double of the individual is closely associated, and the belief is
evidently a modification of the idea, found universally in folk-
lore, that the soul as a concrete object may be placed in some
secure spot for safe-keeping. In many of the legends cited the
ancestor arises from a Churinga, just as our crow-man does.
Even in this short and unsatisfactory account there are al-
ready apparent several circumstances that make for wonder.
The segregation of the Churinga to the possession of the ini-
tiated man, the mystery sedulously fomented, the air of deceit,
the vacillation of belief, and the accretion about them of
legends due to exaggeration rather than to fact, — all these are
by now well-known indications of the presence of wonder. Nor
is one's impression lessened by reading the long accounts of
Spencer and Gillen. It should be noted, however, that the fear
of the Churinga, among the women at least, may well overbal-
ance any show of wonder ;^° while among the men its spiritual
associations are scarcely of a sort (in view of what has already
been said of the relations of the spirit-crowd and wonder) to
heighten their sense of mysterious segregation with a wonder
born of religious awe. As a whole, however, there seems a
preponderance of evidence for, rather than against, a sense of
wonder concerning these secret and extremely vital objects.
Before turning to the characterization of these legends as
a whole, there is a particular and somewhat peculiar case, men-
tioned earlier in the same volume,^^ which deserves a moment's
special notice. Among the Warramunga there is a totem an-
cestor who, unlike what has happened with every other totem
ancestor except the laughing-boy (who is the echo?), has act-
ually persisted from the Wingara to the present day.*- This
peculiar ancestor is believed to be a monstrous snake, and is
called Wollunqua. "The Wollunqua," say our authors, "is
regarded as a huge beast, so large that, if it were to stand up
80 See above, pp. 88-90.
81 N. T.2, Chap. VII.
82 N. T.2, 226.
164 STUDIES IN THE MABVELLOUS.
on its tail, its head would reach i'ar away into the heavens. It
lives now in a large water-hole called Thapauerlu, hidden away
in a lonely valley amongst the Murehison Range, and there is
alwa^■s the fear that it may take into its head to come out of
its hiding-place and do some damage. It has already been
known, apparently for no particular reason, to destroy a num-
ber of natives, though on one occasion, when attacked, the men
were able to drive it off. Some idea of what the natives feel
in regard to the mythic animal — though it must be remembered
that it is anything but mythic in the eyes of the native — may
be gathered from the fact that, instead of using the name Wol-
lunqua, when speaking of it amongst themselves, they call it
urkulu imppaurinnia, because, so they told us, if they were to
call it too often by its real name they would lose their control
over it and it would come out and eat them all up."^^
It has been thought wise to mention particularly this Wol-
lunqua, not because of its exaggeration of size, or its evident
sanctity, or its wholly animal nature®* — any one of these would
render it remarkable, and the first at least, its size, would en-
title it to a place in wonder — but because all these characteristics
appear in their extraordinary vividness to be the result of bring-
ing the remote home to the present. We have before this
insisted that remoteness of the Avonderful is not calculated
to keep the heart thrilling with wonder.®^ Here, in the con-
trast between the more sober regard with which the ordinary
totemic ancestor is contemplated and the striking concern dis-
played toward the Wollunqua, may be detected a fair example
of that observation. This affluence of wonder, again, would in
all probability be the fortune of every totemic ancestor could
they all be conceived as still living. The constant insistence
upon the Wollunqua 's stupendous length, as, for instance, that
after traveling underground many, many miles his tail was
still in its original resting place; the uniqueness of his position,
inasmuch as this great progenitor is supposed to be the only
surviving animal of his kind; the fearful approach to the mys-
83 N. T.2, 227.
84 N. T.2, 493.
8'>See above, pp. 123-124.
WONDER IN CENTRAL A USTRALIAN BELIEF AND STORY. 165
terious pool where he dwells, — all these are details that lift
the WoUunqua into a place of notability in wonder as com-
pared with the founders of other totems. A present god, as it
were,- is indeed a greater marvel than an absent one !
But what of the general character of these legends as a
whole? In answering this question it is possible to speak of
the totem legends collected in Spencer and Gillen's first volume
as well as of those in the second ; for the details that make
up the tales of the first collection are practically identical with
those of the second, which we have just discussed. Upon look-
ing over these collections for the first time, the prevailing im-
pression is one of sameness. Tale after tale repeats the same
formula, — the same material and the same handling; so that
reading one legend is equivalent to reading twenty. And yet,
upon a somewhat closer examination, it is found that in pro-
portion to the variation in distribution of the two sorts of
details, aitiological and 'heroic', the general character of the
legends varies from a meagre matter-of-fact list of answers to
certain questions connected with the totem, on the one hand, to
a considerably richer exploitation of the details involved in
such answers, on the other hand. A division of character may
thus be made into the heroic and aitiological; and though there
may occur legends where the exploitation is too slight to admit
of definite classification under one or the other head, the division
will nevertheless be of real value in the greater number of cases.
One caution, however, needs mention. It may be that the dif-
ference in length and richness of interest between certain of
the legends is due rather to the fulness or meagreness of the
report of the tale than to the original recital. Whether this be
so or not, or where it is so, I am unable to tell. This ignorance
is all the more distressing in view of a still stronger induction
that may be made if the tales are in their original form.
Until, therefore, further light is shed upon the question, it is
necessary to restrain our conclusions somewhat tentatively within
as modest bounds as possible. The attempt must be made to
state them in such fashion that they will not be invalidated even
if the lack of elaboration in many of the legends proves to be
166 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS.
due to the compression of the reporters, while they may be
strengthened if the apparent contrast proves a real one.
Of the shorter, or more strictly aitiological character, the
crow legend examined above is an example. The details are
exclusively aitiological. There is nothing of what we have
termed the 'heroic' detail, — that is, traveling underground, or
mounting into the sky, etc. Questions closely connected with
the tribe and totem are answered with no pause to exaggerate
the power or importance of the ancestor. How the Unmatjera
began, why a certain totemic ancestor was a crow, how the
custom of circumcision and the like arose, what certain peculiar
stones mean : these are the questions answered. Probably, also,
the beforehand action of the two old Parthenie lizard men ex-
plains some circumstance of the Unmatjera economy. To these
questions it is necessary to add only a few others in order to
possess a fairly complete list of the aitiological subjects upon
which the legends exercise themselves. How various other cus-
toms arose, how the different totemic ceremonies originated,
what other features of the landscape mean, how the markings
of certain animals were made: these, together with the aitiolog-
ical details discussed above at length, give a good idea of the
common motives of the various aitiological legends. Now, it
has been pointed out that the aitiological detail is seldom, if
ever, originally felt as wonderful. Only much later generations,
whose keener and far more discriminating and reflective obser-
vation has become conscious of the categories of natural law
and strict classifications of kind, are able to look back upon
their primitive science and, through ignorance of its original
character, pronounce it wonder and delusion. It is right, then,
to assume that tales which are composed almost exclusively of
such 'scientific' details are not as a whole wonderful to the
savage. The only question is whether we actually have before
us legends of simple and unelaborated character : that such
tales necessarily precede the more heroic sort, or that their sim-
plicity is due to a lower rather than to a higher development,
are points that in the absence of evidence it is unfortunately
impossible to determine. But to whatever circumstance, or set
of circumstances, such tales are due, certain it is that tales so
WONDER IN CENTRAL AUSTRALIAN BELIEF AND STORY. 167
predominantly aitiological are essentially devoid of the wonder
element in the consciousness of those who make and rehearse
them with an implicit belief in their character and truth.
The longer sort of legend, where the ancestor is felt more
in a way that approximates, at least, to the heroic sentiment
of later times, and where, as one may say, the ancestor is on
the road to become a hero, must be illustrated by another quota-
tion from the collection. Most of the tales of this heroic sort
are rather lengthy — three or four times as long as the crow tale —
and the full realization of their far more elaborate character can
be gained only from the longest. One that falls somewhat short
of this extreme elaboration must, however, do service here. It
is the legend of
PITTONGU, THE FLYING FOX.
* ' In the "Wingara, Pittongu, the flying fox, a Thapanunga man, arose
in the country away to the north of the Warramimga and travelled south
until he came near to Altunga in the eastern Macdonnell Eanges. He met
a number of black-fellows who had lubrasss with them, and among the
latter two young ones whom he wanted to secure as wives for himself,
though one of them was Naralu and the other Nungalla, and therefore
neither of them his proper wife. After thinking how he could best secure
them — because of course the black-fellows would not give them to him of
their own accord — he killed a bandicoot and put some of the blood on his
foot and pretended to be lame and so unable to go any further. The men
went out hunting, leaving the women in the main camp, and the stranger
sat down, wondering what it was best for him to do so as to secure the
two women. Going a little way out into the scrub, so as to be out of sight,
he changed himself into a dog and then came back again to the women's
camp. All of them were there except the two younger ones, who happened
to be out hunting in the bush, and when they saw him the old women said,
' Hullo, here is a big dog coming up ', and they called to it, but the dog
would not come near them and only snarled, so they left it alone. At
dusk the two younger ones returned, and the dog at once went up to
them wagging his tail and playing about them. The two said, 'This is
a very good dog for us to hunt with', and it stayed with them. They
tried next day to go in several directions, but each time the dog stopped
and refused to go on, until at length they directed their steps towards the
north, from which direction the man had come, and then the dog walked
along with them. The dog went in the lead, rounding up the wallabies,
the lubras following up behind. It drove the animals into holes, the mouth
[sic'l of which it then filled up with stones. At length the dog went on
ahead, right out of sight of the women, and changed itself back into a
80 Consorts.
168 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS.
man. He returned to search for his spears and boomerangs, which ho had
secreted in the scrub. The lubras meanwhile came up and caught a large
number of the wallabies, but were much surprised not to see any trace of
the dog. Seeing the black-fellow approaching, they were frightened, but he
said to them, 'Why are you frightened? I made the wallabies go into
the holes. ' Then he said, ' We will walk along my country now ', but the
women declined to go with him. However, taking his spear-thrower,
he tangled their hairs together and threw them on a long way ahead of
himself to a place called Athalta, where he halted for a time and where,
for the purpose of making himself better looking, he knocked out a tooth.
Then he camped close by Thapauerlu, the home of the Wollunqua, and
there he pulled out another tooth. He was the first man to knock teeth
out, and he did so because he wanted the lubras to think him good-looking.
He carried with him mauia (e\'il magic), spears, tomahawks, stone knives,
and various other implements. All the way as he travelled across the
country he left spirit children behind him and threw the two lubras on
ahead. From what is now known as the Elsey Creek he threw them on
as far as Pine Creek, and there he finally left them and went up into the
sky. A mob of black-fellows saw him coming and threw their boomerangs
with their right hands, hoping to kill him, but could not touch him. Then
they threw with their left hand and he fell down. As he fell they shouted
out, 'Don't drop this way; drop with your head looking towards the Warra-
munga. ' Accordingly he did so, and his legs stretched out right beyond Pine
Creek. When he passed over the Warramunga country he dropped stone
axes, which is why the natives of these parts are specially good at making
the axes; in the same way he dropped stone-knives in the Tjingilli country,
which is why the Tjingilli men now make the best knives, and then away
to the north, he dropped barbed spears in the country where these are
now made. ' 's^
Now this recital combines in a most interesting fashion the
short aitiological information-tale and the elaborated heroic
legend. The second half is mostly aitiological, and quite simply so ;
the first half is almost entirely heroic, and very richly so. The con-
trast between the two halves, or between the first half and the crow
tale, speaks for itself. In this first half, the suspense of denoue-
ment gained by meticulous detail, the suggestion of character,
and the thrilling climax — or, in a word, the sense for story dis-
played — immediately lift us into the realm of narrative interest.
Here is no mere answering of questions. Here is an adventure,
well told, appealing to human instincts, resting its power on
its appeal to human emotions. Here is that exaggeration of the
hero's cunning, of his patience, of his power, that characterizes
the art of the story-teller. Here, to be brief, is the beginning
87 N. T.2, 427-428; for other 'heroic' tales, see pp. 396, 405, 409, 424,
431, 435, 445, 451.
WONDER IN CENTEAL A USTEALIAN BELIEF AND STOEY. 169
of the tale par excellence, the real home of marvel, that distinc-
tive region where thrives most strongly that marvel which is
born of the teller's desire to thrill and the listener's desire to
be thrilled. And as it was predicted above that the marvellous
would find its emphatic beginning with the 'telling' that passes
later into literature and literary fiction,^^ so we here find that
particular sort of detail which among the mass examined has ap-
peared most inclined toward the wonderful — the 'heroic' detail
as we have called it — making its appearance contemporaneously
with the evidence of the beginning of the elaboration of an
art of 'telling.' The aitiological detail is evidently expanded.
The ancestor has an adventure in procuring his wives. He has
all the heroic powers examined elsewhere, and others in addition.
They can hardly be added by mere chance to the aitiological
elements. There is no need for them as causes for anything. They
make for interest, for story. They are exaggerations that hold
the wonder. His power of transforming himself into a dog is
a rarity in the collection; it is also a rarity in the life of the
Central Australian to-day. Only the great and wonderful magi-
cian can accomplish such a feat. Again, Pittongu's power of
throwing the two lubras ahead of him is a strictly individual
touch ; and the very dwelling upon it, the repetition and careful
dwelling upon it even to the point of localizing the extraordinary
feat, all bespeak a lively sense of rarity, of a perdurable wonder,
almost of a marvel. Almost of a marvel: for the information
as to the exact distance he threw them, from Elsey to Pine Creek,
seems, in part at least, to be motived by a very vivid sense of
present-day impossibility. Then, too, the mighty extension of the
hero's fall, the almost Miltonic picture of his giant limbs resting
upon the country, as Satan's rested upon the sea of fire, is a
further note of strong exaggeration. If there were time, other
heroic details from some of the other legends might be described
side by side with these. The m3'sterious, fearful, and secret
Kurdaitcha men, who play a part half villain, half bogey; the
mischievous Oruntja-spirits; the growling hearts, which oddly
remind the reader of one of Poe 's marvellous tales ; another tre-
mendous snake, whose head, like the Wollunqua's, can reach up
into the sky : these can only be mentioned here as strengthening
88 See above, p. 74.
170 STUDIES IN THE MAEVELLOUS.
the present contention that with the development of a sense for
story there is the addition of exaggerated and wonderful details.
Upon this point of the present inquiry, then, the finger of
emphasis must be placed with determination. To be sure, even
the most elaborate of these tales is, judged by modern standards,
elaborated very meagerly; and one is impressed far more by a
stock sameness of detail, and almost cast-iron tradition of form-
ula, than by any evidence of a free, plastic imagination. And
yet there is elaboration, beyond the aitiological 'science' of prim-
itive life, into a sort of wonder; there is a lifting up of emotion
and imagination into 'story-interest.' Thus comes into light a
faint beginning of the marvellous of literature proper.
We have traveled a long way in order to gain a careful ap-
proach to this faint beginning, and fully as much attention has
been paid to what is not wonderful to primitive consciousness
as to what is. Nay, more space has been given to the negative
side ; because we conceive that the first and most important step
in the present research is to show how elements which in a later
age and developed literature come to be regarded as wonders,
originated without any aroma of thaumaturgy. But here at least
there is marked a positive stage in the course of conscious wonder,
— an initial stage, but nevertheless unmistakable, starting out
(we see it in the very act of development) from the non-wonder-
ful aitiology of a narrow consciousness, advancing with an
exaggeration of familiar elements, gathering impetus with the
addition of further heroic elements, and culminating in a
realism of action and detail by which exaggeration magnifies
the past and its great characters, and brings home for a moment
to the mind of the listener the wonders of a remote Alcheringa.
Thus, in connection with the most important social phenomenon
of the Central Australian, the totem, we gain our first positive,
empirical result in the study of the marvellous.*"
soother tales not directly connected with the totems — 'myths' as Spen-
cer and Gillen call them — tales of the sun, moon, stars, rainbow, whirlwind,
and the like, aro nevertheless made up so closely after the pattern of the
regular totem legends that it is quite unnecessary to consider them sepa-
rately. The only point to be emphasized is that amongst this primitive
people there is as yet no difference of treatment of wonder or jtre-marvel-
lous elements as they pass from social and ancestral legends to the contem-
plation and explanation of the greater and more remote features of nature.
These so-called myths are very few in number, and may be found in Chapter
XVTII of the first, and Chapter XXII of the second volume of Spencer and
Gillen.
CHAPTER V.
CONCLUSION.
In the preceding chapters an essay has been made toward
uncovering the sources and the rise of the marvellous in litera-
ture. Throughout those chapters we have been looking always
forward to the stage where literature would begin to take up
into itself and transform the elements of experience, custom,
and belief; the point of view has been from non-literary begin-
nings toward literary inceptions, rather than the reverse. But,
now that the first stage in the inquiry has been completed by
the survey of the sources in primitive custom and belief, and
the rise therefrom of wonders into that first faint dawn of nar-
rative literature, the semi-heroic tale, it is proper to pause and
from our present vantage look backward over the fields that
have been traversed. Thus the actual results for literature may
be rescued from the mass of psychological and ethnological
detail and set clearly and emphatically before the literary stu-
dent.
In taking such a retrospect it immediately becomes evident
that the progress toward these faint literary beginnings of
the marvellous has been through a series of narrowing circles ;
and, furthermore, that each of these circles has revealed the
marvellous in a characteristic aspect. From the historical view
of Greek criticism of fiction and marvel it soon became evident
that literary criticism itself was originally a development from
the moral and philosophical criticism of the wonders and mar-
vels that the Greeks had inherited, through their myths, from
the unphilosophical and uncritical days of their remote begin-
nings. There, indeed, we saw what Dr. Tylor so eloquently
refers to as that "momentous phase of the education of man-
kind, when the regularity of nature has so imprinted itself upon
men 's minds that they begin to wonder how it is that the ancient
legends which they were brought up to hear with such reverend
172 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS.
delight, should describe a world so strangely different from
their own. Why, they ask, are the gods and giants and monsters
no longer seen to lead their prodigious lives on earth — is it per-
chance that the course of things is changed since the old days ? ' '^
In that stage men wondered at the wonderful, marvelled at the
marvellous. And in their earnestness they came to take into
questioning consideration not only the more striking and offen-
sive of the old wonders, but the whole field of fiction as well.
Graduall}^ very gradually, they passed from the first severe
denunciations of impious fiction, through the steps of rationaliza-
tion, allegory, euhemerism, and the like, to a proper literary
criticism that was divorced from the moral and philosophical
view, and could contemplate the marvellous in literature under
that imaginative light which is the true and distinguishing
character of the realm of literary art. Thus, finally, a new view
— what might also be called the modern view — the view of poetic
truth and artistic illusion — came into being; and the marvellous
entered into a new stage, — that of aesthetic development.
The second circle of our inquiry was somewhat narrower ; for
it embraced, not the general field of the criticism of wonder,
but the more particular question, how do men wonder, or, what
is wondering psychologically speaking? Here an examination
was made of the processes that had been tacitly subsumed in
the first field by the criticism of their results. And once again
a character of the marvellous was brought to light. In the
course of a description of the complex nature of wonder, it
grew clear that as wonder ascends in power and intensity it
passes through an ascending series of rarities and improbabil-
ities, until, reaching a culmination in impossibility, it is fitly
called marvelling. Moreover, in view of the fact that in im-
aginative literature, the home of exaggeration, there has always
existed a standard of ideal possibility, whereby the impossible
ceases from being absolutely and prosaically impossible, it was
immediately apparent that in literature this marvelling finds
its peculiarly appropriate sustenance and field of activity. Relig-
ion, with its aspects of faith and superstition, offers a similar
1 Primitive Culture, I, 275.
CONCLUSION. 173
field and support. Hence the naturalness, not to say the inevi-
tability, of the close association between literature and religion
in the matter of the marvellous. Here there was a recognition
that the marvellous would find its place in literature, and thrive
there under the fostering guidance of religious faith and super-
stition, long before it would be ready to enter upon its aesthetic
development under the tutelage of a properly emancipated liter-
ary criticism.
Armed with the subjective criteria gained from this field,
primitive mind, custom, and belief, and the relations between
literature, religion, and the marvellous, were contemplated in
their simplest possible manifestations. Two great facts made
their appearance. In the first place, it was recognized that, in
a vast number of cases, what is wonderful or marvellous to the
minds of later generations was simple fact to the primitive con-
sciousness. To understand, therefore, the marvellous elements
in literature, it became necessary to determine so far as possible
what marvels were wonderful, and what not wonderful, to the
primitive mind. This meant an examination not only of the
character of early mind, but also of the sources of marvel-
elements in early custom and belief. Such an examination
brought out the second significant fact, — viz., that there can be
distinguished more or less clearly two tendencies — one making
against wonder, the other for it — which run through many prim-
itive customs and the original mental attitudes toward them.
The more primitive the people, the greater the former tendency ;
the less primitive, the greater the latter. Moreover, the latter
tendency was seen to be characterized by the principles of segre-
gation and individualization, whereby details and powers are
differentiated from the communal mass. Gods and priests, magi-
cians and magic as 'magical,' and the custom of taboo, were
seen to illustrate this tendency. But underlying all these, and
the entire tendency, was the mental trick of exaggeration, often
joined with deceit. Through exaggeration the tendency to wonder
was abetted; through it, details which were not originally and
distinctly felt as wonderful became wonderful. But exaggera-
tion is primarily a matter of 'telling,' of rehearsing. It is
mind and mouth that lend exaggeration to a matter; the tale
174 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS.
spring's spontaneously from the lips of the exaggerator. Thus,
in this field also, literature, or at least its faint beginning, was
seen to be peculiarly bound up with wonder. And the greater
the exaggeration, the more of a wonder. As in the history of
criticism the marvellous was seen to be closely related to the
beginnings of that discipline, so here, with the beginnings of
'narative' literature, wonder is woven into the fabric of the
tale by the very exaggerating force that contributes so largely to
its origin.
The last and narrowest of our circles took' us from the gen-
eral field of primitive mind to the particular field of the beliefs,
customs, and legends of one of the most primitive of existing
races, the Central Australians. Guided by the sense of direction
gained in exploring the larger field, and supported by the de-
scriptive criteria of the previous chapter but one, it was not
difficult to detect among this people illustrations of our general
observation that many a wonder element, recognized as such
to-day, was plain matter-of-fact to the savage. Many such ele-
ments were named, and their origin briefly suggested, so that
at some other time their progress to wonder through later de-
velopment may be fitly observed. It is not claimed that any-
thing like entire success has been achieved in the difficult task
of differentiating among these primitive tribes the details that
are wonderful from those that are not wonderful. The most
that could be done in this first sketch of the situation, limited
as we are by an insufficiency of direct evidence, as well as by
the novelty of the attempt, was to make clear the general truth
of our conclusions by such a fulness of detail that a mistake in
the judgment of a single detail here and there would not invali-
date the entire argument. It was in following up the first posi-
tive step in the exploitation of wonder that we were brought to
the particular character of the marvellous that this chapter had
to offer. The particular case of actual legends concerning the
ancestors of these Australians proved the accuracy of the general
observ^ation upon the relation of literature and marvel which
was developed in the preceding chapter. Here, indeed, was de-
tected a simultaneous and associated growth of wonder and the
hero-tale from the religio-scientific details of the aitiological col-
CONCLUSION. 175
lections, — a growth that in either ease was motived by the force
of a natural exaggeration. This exaggeration was evident both
in its wonder-making influence upon elements of custom and
belief, which originally were matters of fact, and also in its
creation of certain so-called 'heroic' details out of the fund of
general experience. Thus the hero-tale, bred from what might
be called an aitiological ancestor (even if he were a real an- "^
cestor the term might be retained), and forming the beginning
of a narrative literature, comes to take its place as aiding the
tendency toward wonder by accommodating it with a natural
field for its activity. Such an alliance is bound to produce the
higher reaches of wonder in a comparatively short time.
Finally, it should be emphasized again that the first step into
'literature' was taken through the agency of a social institution,
the totem. Further research into the subsequent stages of the
development of the marvellous in literature must take this fact
as a cue to the perdurably social aspect of the question.
Our four circles of progress have thus each shown a peculiar
affinity between the marvellous and literature. The discussion
of the psychological aspect of the question adequately showed
the reason for this affinity. Briefly, in a w'ord, it may be said
that both are all compacted of imagination; and that the latter,
literature, offers the most natural playground to the former.
It would be easy here to wax philosophical and attempt to raise
a theory upon the inter-relations of religion, literature, and mar-
vel, — a theory that would have as much bearing upon later and
even present-day cycles of thought and expression as upon the
epoch of beginnings. I believe that in such a system the mar-
vellous would furnish the connecting link or common element;
and that the better understanding of its glamor would tend as
much to emancipate the faith of religion as to inspire a new
and more spiritual romanticism. The marvellous has given the
romantic tone to both religion and literature ; the analysis of that
tone, which after all is the purpose of these studies, would,
if brought home to the minds and hearts of a race, mean a new
day of creation, springing with brighter and whiter light from
the old barbaric days of gloom and mystery.
But no such theory is to be traced here. Instead, the remark
176 STUDIES IN THE MABFELLOUS.
may be hazarded that the peculiarly intimate relation between
literature and wonder pointed out in this tentative essay has
never been sufficiently contemplated. Ever.y romantic epoch
brings round sufficient evidence of the reality of the relation,
and ample guarantee for the dignity of a careful examination
into its nature and origin. The present advances in psychology are
helping to minimize the subjective difficulties of the subject, and
the nearer to national literatures the study advances, the greater
the amount of direct evidence; modern ethnological research is
daily increasing the data of the remoter reaches of the problem ;
the freedom of criticism in the present, together with its wealth
of apparatus, offers an opportunity of dispassionate, if not
exhaustive, study such as seldom before has been extended to
the scholar. On the other hand, the advantages to the theory
and history of literature would surely not be inconsiderable.
The examination should be extended through other culture-
grades of savage and barbaric races ; the development into won-
der of the aitiological details should be noted, classified, and
explained; the creation of new wonders through individual
exaggeration of elements of thought and experience, should be
considered in conjunction with the rise of new economic condi-
tions as they affect the increasing significance of the individual
in society; the characteristic variations in the wonder elements
should be examined, and their treatment should be traced as they
pass from ancestor-tale and legend to myth, from myth and
legend to the self-conscious literary art of the epic, from early
epic to other types — tragedy, comedy, satire, novel — in their later
development: all the course of characteristic variations under
these changes of circumstances should be noted and correlated
with the passing of one literary epoch after another. "What a
field is opened in the European Middle Ages ! What a contrast
in the recurring successions of creative and critical periods !
Nor would the least fascinating aspect of the subject lie in an
exploration of oriental marvel-literature and its comparison with
occidental wonder.
INDEX.
INTKODUCTION.
PAGE
Iktboduction 3
The marvellous in Eomance — Its profusion, and recurrent
character — Its neglect by literary criticism — Aristotle — Desul-
tory and fragmentary nature of wonder-criticism after
Aristotle — Data furnished by the ethnologists — The opportunity
for a criticism of the marvellous — Purpose and plan of the
present work — History of the usage of the term ' ' marvellous ' '
— as an intensive — as denoting the supernatural — in other
languages — Suggestiveness of these usages.
CHAPTER I.
Greek Cbiticism of Fiction axd Makvel 14
Outline of method — The philosophical doubt: (a) the
earlier expostulation with myth; (b) Pindar and the 'Charis
Doctrine'; (c) Xenophanes; (d) Empedocles; (e) Plato —
Philosophical attempts to explain the mar^-el in myth: (o) the
allegorists; (fc) Euhemerism — The beginnings of literary criti-
cism proper: (a) Aristotle; (ft) Dionysius of Halicarnassus ;
(c) 'Demetrius'; (d) Plutarch; (e) 'Longinus' — Minor phil-
osophers, rhetoricians, etc. — Conclusion: eight general points.
CHAPTEE II.
The Psychoi-ogy of Woxder _ 52
Inadequacy of previous descriptions of wonder — States
allied to wonder: (1) surprise, astonishment, and curiosity;
(a) surprise differentiated logically, as in sudden and unusual
experiences; (6) surprise differentiated physiologically, as in
short and long "circuits"; (c) passing of surprise [through
astonishment, at times] to curiosity and wonder; (d) relations
of curiosity, explanation, and wonder; (e) six tj'pical cases;
(f) differentiation of the improbable and the impossible, and
their relations to wonder and marvel and to the six typical cases;
(g) the marvellous: (2) belief and wonder; (a) definition;
(6) degree of belief consonant with wonder; (c) the ridicu-
lous; (d) belief and the standard of ideal possibility: (3)
imagination and the marvellous: (4) fear and marvel: (5)
pleasure and marvel. — Summary.
CHAPTER TIL
PAGE
WoNDEK IN Primitive Mind, Custom, and Belief 93
What is wonderful to the primitive? — Difficulties in
answering — Subjective difficulty — Unreliability of data —
General description of primitive mind, custom, and belief
— Preliminary difficulties and objections — Vierkandt's pic-
ture of primitive mind and belief — Points, in primitive
conditions, making against wonder: (a) no conception of
unexceptional regularity; (b) matter-of-fact character of
belief in spirits who cause rarities; (c) no impossibility
possible to primitive consciousness; (d) primitive curi-
osity not favorable to wonder; (e) primitive belief and
imagination not favorable to wonder; (f) magic as 'scien-
tific'; (g) animism — Points, in primitive conditions, making
for wonder: (a) segregated nature of gods; (b) of priest;
(c) of magician; (d) of magic as 'magical'; (e) of taboo;
(/■) exaggeration — Summary.
CHAPTER IV.
Wonder in Central Australian Belief and Story 135
Discussion of sources — General cultural conditions of Cen-
tral Australians ; identity among tribes ; low stage of culture
— In such a stage the forces against wonder strongly present
— More important to regard the forces making for wonder —
General crowd of spirits not wonderful to natives — Particular
spirits and wonder — No gods — Other particular spirits — Magi-
cian and wonder; segregation and initiation; extraordinary
powers; deceit; exaggeration — Totemic traditions and legends
— Heroic and aitiological legends — Wonder in the heroic —
Combination of animal and human characteristics — The inmin-
tera, Churinga, and Wollunqua — Character of the legends as a
whole — The beginning of wonder in literature — Summary : the
relation between the beginnings of wonder and of literature.
CONCLUSION.
Conclusion 171
ERRATA.
Page 40: Note 91 should read, See above, pp. 33-34.
Page 41: Note 96 should read, See above, p. 34.
Page 44: Note 110 should read, See above, p. 43.
Page 45: Note 116 should read, See above, p. 43.
Page 45: Note 118 should read, See above, p. 42.
Page 57: Note 20 should read. See above, p. 52, note 3.
Page 57: Note 21 should read. See above, p. 55, note 14.
Page 59, line 4: Read that is, instead of that, is.
Page 97: Line 16 should follow after line 22.
Page 103, note 28, line 3: Read experiential.
J. <
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