148 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 
only if it is given by persons especially well placed or well qualified to 
obtain it. No one would accept a fact on fourth-hand evidence alone, 
yet this is what tradition is at best. Why historical facts should be capable 
of accurate oral transmission for hundreds and even thousands of years, 
while no other fact can pass down the length of a street without hopeless 
distortion, no one, so far as I can learn, has attempted to explain. Until 
someone has done so I shall feel justified in concluding not merely that 
no illiterate person has ever wished to transmit an historical fact, but that 
no illiterate person would be capable of transmitting an historical fact even 
if he wished to, and that M. Gaston Paris was right when he said that there 
was no such thing as historic oral tradition. 
‘TRADITION AND IMAGINATION. 
At a later stage I shall give illustrations showing that incidents which 
occur in tradition are never historical, and, conversely, that historical facts 
never find their way into tradition. Here it will be convenient to deal 
with the belief that certain forms of the traditional narrative are the result 
of imagination, and then to set out my own view of the origin of the 
traditional narrative. ‘The attempt to divide it into two classes, the his- 
torical and the imaginative, has been made by various writers, notably 
Hartland, MacCulloch and Krappe.? 
Hartland tells us* that the art of story-telling is the outcome of an 
instinct implanted universally in the human mind, and that in the Marchen 
or fairy tale ‘ the reins are thrown upon the neck of the imagination.’ 
MacCulloch says that all over the world simple stories were invented, 
and that ‘ as time went on and man’s inventive and imaginative faculties 
‘ developed, these simple stories . . . became incidents in longer tales.’ 4 
Krappe says that it is ‘ certainly excusable to take the common-sense view, 
‘ and to regard the fairy tale as a definite type of popular fiction, primarily 
‘ designed to please and to entertain.’ ® 
Having stated it as an axiom that fairy tales are the product of the 
story-tellers’ imagination, all three writers proceed, with a convenient 
inconsistency, to show that no story-teller ever displays any imagination 
whatever. It will perhaps suffice to quote Hartland. He says that ‘ it is 
‘ by no means an uncommon thing for the rustic story-teller to be unable 
‘to explain episodes in any other way than Uncle Remus—‘ She wuz in 
‘ de tale, en de tale I give you like hit were gunto me.”’ After telling us 
that Gaelic stories often contain obsolete words; that Swahili story- 
tellers hardly understand the sung parts of their stories, and that Eskimo 
story-tellers have to stick as closely as possible to the traditional version, 
he concludes that, wherever and whenever stories are told, ‘ the endeavour 
“to render to the audience just that which the speaker has himself received 
‘ from his predecessors is paramount.’® ‘Then where does the imagina- 
tion come in? There is no more evidence that illiterate people invent 
fables than there is that they transmit historical facts. We must seek the 
origin of the traditional narrative elsewhere. 
* E.S. Hartland, The Science of Fairy Tales; J. A. MacCulloch, The Childhood 
of Fiction; A. H. Krappe, The Science of Folklore. 
SSP pirn23: 4 P. 457. SIPHyire 6 Pp. 18, 21. 
