importance at a given time, but of that which is potential and
possible at all times.

The novel of romance and adventure has had a long history, and the
elements of which it is compounded are recognisable long before they
took the form of fiction. Two figures appear and reappear in the
mythology of every poetic people,--the hero and the wanderer; the man
who achieves and the man who experiences; the man who masters life
by superiority of soul or body, and the man who masters it by
completeness of knowledge. It is interesting and pathetic to find how
universally these two figures held the attention and stirred the
hearts of primitive men; how infinitely varied are their tasks, their
perils, and their vicissitudes. They wear so many guises, they bear so
many names, they travel so far and compass so much experience that it
is impossible, in any interpretation of mythology, to escape the
conviction that they were the dominant types in the thought of the
myth-makers. And these earliest story-makers were not idle dreamers,
entertaining themselves by endless manufacture of imaginary incidents,
conditions, and persons. They were, 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