nificance of the image, which is in all
the great myths eternally and beneficently true.

7. The great myths; that is to say, myths made by great people. For the
first plain fact about myth-making is one which has been most strangely
lost sight of,--that you cannot make a myth unless you have something to
make it of. You cannot tell a secret which you don't know. If the myth
is about the sky, it must have been made by somebody who has looked at
the sky. If the myth is about justice and fortitude, it must have been
made by someone who knew what it was to be just or patient. According to
the quantity of understanding in the person will be the quantity of
significance in his fable; and the myth of a simple and ignorant race
must necessarily mean little, because a simple and ignorant race have
little to mean. So the great question in reading a story is always, not
what wild hunter dreamed, or what childish race first dreaded it; but
what wise man first perfectly told, and what strong people first
perfectly lived by it. And the real meaning of any myth is that which it
has at the noblest age of the nation among whom it is current. The
farther back you pierce, the less significance you will find, until you
come to the first narrow thought, which, indeed, contains the germ of the
accomplished tradition; but only as the seed contains the flower. As the
intelligence and passion of the race develop, they cling to and nourish
their beloved and sacred legend; leaf by leaf it expands under the touch
of more pure affections, and more delicate imagination, until at last the
perfect fable burgeons out into symmetry of milky stem and honied bell.

8. But through whatever changes it may pass, remember that our right
reading of it is wholly dependent on the materials we have in our own
minds for an intelligent answering sympathy. If it first arose among a
people who dwelt under stainless skies, and measures their journeys by
ascending and declining stars, we certainly cannot read their story, if
we have never seen anything above us in the day but smoke, nor anything
around us in the night but candles. If the tale goes on to change clouds
or planets into living creatures,--to invest them with fair forms and
inflame them with mighty passions,--we can only understand the story of
the human-hearted things, in so far as we ourselves take pleasure in the
perfectness of visible form, or can sympathize, by an effort of
imagination, w