THE INDIAN FAIRY BOOK 569 



matter has likely been grafted upon an older form and the whole tale 

 has come to represent a slow accretion from one generation to another 

 through many phases of culture and over vast periods of time. 

 Whether a race of dwarf men inhabited lands that were later invaded by 

 men of larger stature and more advanced culture and gave rise to con- 

 ceptions of gnomes and " little people/' as suggested by Sir Harry 

 Johnston, is a matter of purely speculative interest. As this writer 

 has pointed out, the African forest pygmies, who represent a very an- 

 cient type of man that was once widely spread in Europe, as well as in 

 Africa, have certain characteristics, as suddenly vanishing from sight 

 and as suddenly appearing, that might well have given rise to folk 

 myths. Such may have been the origin of our Santa Claus, a hyper- 

 borean dwarf -myth arising out of the reindeer-herding Lapps in that 

 dim land beyond the Scandinavian mountains. 



The gift of the mythopceic faculty belongs to childhood — individual 

 and racial. Education in the modern sense — the education of the 

 school — is its arch enemy. The rank, tall-growing weeds of knowledge 

 soon choke out this joyous bloom of the aboriginal soil. We enter the 

 school and straightway a mist drifts across our past, blotting out the 

 early years, and the days of romance, and myth, and make-believe are 

 speedily forgotten. Yet out of this enchanted mist — for it is en- 

 chanted, like the mist that shrouded Geraint when he left Enid to 

 fight against the knight — some of us may still, in rare moments, have 

 glimpses that will make us " less forlorn." As Geraint dispelled the 

 mist by the overthrow of his adversary, so we must, if we desire these 

 visions, break through the mist that envelops them with the magic 

 arm of imaginative memory, for no weapon of knowledge may serve us 

 in its stead. 



The backward extension of each individual life through many gen- 

 erations of germ-plasm carries us all back to a common racial child- 

 hood. Much of this racial childhood is recapitulated in the first years 

 of individual existence — old race instincts, strange primitive ways, and 

 the love for stories about beasts, and men, and fairy people. These 

 myths and folk tales are thus part of a racial heritage, and happy in- 

 deed are those of us who, in our maturity, can still feel with the poet 

 when he exclaimed — 



— Great God! I'd rather be 

 A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; 

 So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 

 Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; 

 Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, 

 Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. 



As we love JEsop and Uncle Remus, the Odyssey and the Celtic 

 tales, so we love these folk stories of aboriginal America, for they are 

 of the same lineage — the early, unsophisticated outlook upon life and 

 the Powers of Darkness. 



vol. iiXxvr. — 39. 



