[Sidenote: because it implies sentimental savages,]
[Sidenote: which is contrary to our experience.]
§ 20. It is now very long since I first declared myself against this theory[39:1], not as false, but as wholly inadequate to explain the great wealth and variety of the Greek legends. On that occasion I argued the case at length, and showed more especially that the mental condition presupposed in the primitive Indo-Europeans by this theory was not provable, and was, moreover, contradicted by everything which we know of the psychological condition of any such people. The theory implies such a daily joy and a nightly terror, when the sun rose and set, as coloured the whole language of the primitive race, and gave them one topic which wholly occupied their imaginations. Seeing that men must have existed for a long time before they invented legends, perhaps even before they used language, such fresh and ever-recurring astonishment would be indeed a marvellous persistence of childish simplicity[39:2]. Moreover, what we do know of savage men shows us that surprise and wonder imply a good deal of intellectual development, and that the primitive savage does not wonder at, but ignores, those phenomena which interest higher men.
It is a much more reasonable view to discard the changes of the day, and adopt those of the year, as having suggested early myths of the death of beautiful youths, and the lamentation of those that loved them. I do not know a more masterly treatment of this cause for early myths, such as the death of Adonis, of Linus, of Maneros (in Egypt), than the opening of K. O. Müller's _History of Greek Literature_. It is a book now fifty years old, and our knowledge has so much advanced that Müller's views are in many points antiquated, as I have shown in re-writing the history of the same great subject[40:1]. But nothing could antiquate the genius of K. O. Müller, or the grace with which he shows that the plaintive lays of shepherd and of vine-dresser express the poignant regrets excited by the burning up of green and bloom in the fierce heats of a semi-tropical summer. We now know that Nature provides this rest for her vegetation in meridional climates; but the sleep of plants in the drought of torrid sunshine seems to men far less natural than their rest in the long nights and under the white pall of a northern winter, and thus were suggested myths of violence and cruelty.