IN LITERATURE
pre-Homeric legend, but no attempt at the Homeric expurgation is here, unless the swan in the second story be such. Far from desiring any expurgation, the medieval audience may have been glad enough that literature should not give an accurate account of their life. They may have liked mystery for its own sake, as there is little reason to think primitive man ever did. Their faculty of wonder, we know, they exercised in contemplating the world to come; if, as we suspect, they rejoiced in this present life also with an almost renaissance paganism, at least they rejoiced surreptitiously. It is incredible that they did not recognize as magic such episodes as we have just summarized; and if this material was as frankly magical to them as it now seems to us, it is a fact of some importance that the middle ages left us few pictures of the world as it was
[135]
