Joseph Wolff, The
Missionary, Distributed Copies Of Robinson Crusoe, Translated
Into Arabic, Among The Arabs, And They Made A Great
Sensation.
"Robinson Crusoe's adventures and wisdom," says he, "were read by
Mahometans in the market-places of Sanaa, Hodyeda, and
Loheya,
and admired and believed!" On reading the book, the Arabians
exclaimed, "O, that Robinson Crusoe must have been a great
prophet!"
To some extent, mythology is only the most ancient history and
biography. So far from being false or fabulous in the common
sense, it contains only enduring and essential truth, the I and
you, the here and there, the now and then, being omitted. Either
time or rare wisdom writes it. Before printing was discovered, a
century was equal to a thousand years. The poet is he who can
write some pure mythology to-day without the aid of posterity.
In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the
story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence for our
classical dictionary, - and then, perchance, have stuck up their
names to shine in some corner of the firmament. We moderns, on
the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and
history, "memoirs to serve for a history," which itself is but
materials to serve for a mythology. How many volumes folio would
the Life and Labors of Prometheus have filled, if perchance it
had fallen, as perchance it did first, in days of cheap printing!
Who knows what shape the fable of Columbus will at length assume,
to be confounded with that of Jason and the expedition of the
Argonauts.
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