on the contrary, the observers, the students, the scientists of their period; their endeavour was not to create a fiction, but to explain the world and themselves.  Their observation was imperfect, and they made ludicrous mistakes of fact because they lacked both knowledge and training; but they made free use of the creative faculty, and there is, consequently, a good deal more truth in their daring guesses than in many of those provisional explanations of nature and ourselves which have been based too exclusively on scrutiny of the obvious fact, and indifference to the fact, which is not less a fact because it is elusive.

The myth-makers endeavoured to explain the world, but that was only one-half of their endeavour; they attempted also to explain themselves.  They discovered the striking analogies between certain natural phenomena or processes and the phenomena and processes of their own nature; they discovered the tasks and wanderings of the sun, and they perceived the singular resemblance of these tasks and wanderings to the happenings of their own lives.  So the hero and the wanderer became subjective as well as objective, and symbolised what was deepest and most universal in human nature and human experience, as well as what was most striking in the external world.  When primitive men looked into their hearts and their experience, they found their deepest hopes, longings, and possibilities bound up and worked out in two careers,—­the career of the hero and the career of the wanderer.

These two figures became the commanding types of all the nobler mythologies, because they symbolised what was best, deepest, and most real in human nature and life.  They represent the possible reach and the occasional achievement of the human soul; they stand for that which is potential as well as for that which is actual in human experience.  Few men achieve or experience on a great scale; but these few are typical, and are, therefore, transcendent in interest.  The average commonplace man fills great space in contemporary history, as in the history of all times, and his character and career are well worth the closest study and the finest art of the writer; but the average man, who never achieves greatly, and to whom no striking or dramatic experience comes, has all the possibilities of action and suffering in his nature, and is profoundly interested in these more impressive aspects of life.  Truth to fact is essential to all sound art, but absolute veracity involves the whole truth,—­the truth of the exceptional as well as of the average experience; the truth of the imagination as well as of observation.