When the traveller looks at Rome for the first time he does not realize
that there have been several cities on the same piece of ground, and
that the churches and palaces and other great buildings he sees to-day
rest on an earlier and invisible city buried in dust beneath the
foundations of the Rome of the Twentieth Century. In like manner, and
because all visible things on the surface of the earth have grown out of
older things which have ceased to be, the world of habits, the ideas,
customs, fancies, and arts, in which we live is a survival of a younger
world which long ago disappeared. When we speak of Friday as an unlucky
day, or touch wood after saying that we have had good luck for a long
time, or take the trouble to look at the new moon over the right
shoulder, or avoid crossing the street while a funeral is passing, we
are recalling old superstitions or beliefs, a vanished world in which
our remote forefathers lived.
We do not realize how much of this vanished world still survives in our
language, our talk, our books, our sculpture and pictures. The plays of
Shakespeare are full of reference to the fancies and beliefs of the
English people in his time or in the times not long before him. If we
could understand all these references as we read, we should find
ourselves in a world as different from the England of to-day as England
is from Austria, and among a people whose ideas and language we should
find it hard to understand.
In those early days there were no magazines or newspapers, and for the
people as contrasted with the scholars there were no books. The most
learned men were ignorant of things which intelligent children know
to-day; only a very few men and women could read or write; and all kinds
of beliefs about animals, birds, witches, fairies, giants, and the
magical qualities of herbs and stones flourished like weeds in a
neglected garden. There came into existence an immense mass of
misinformation about all manner of things; some of it very stupid, much
of it very poetic and interesting. Below the region of exact knowledge
accessible to men of education, lay a region of popular fancies, ideas,
proverbs, and superstitions in which the great mass of men and women
lived, and which was a kind of invisible playground for children. Much
of the popular belief about animals and the world was touched with
imagination and was full of suggestions, illustrations, and pictorial
figures which the poets were quick to use. When the king says to Cranmer
in "Henry VIII:" "Come, come, my lord, you'd spare your spoons," he was
thinking of the old custom of giving children at christenings silver or
gilt spoons with handles shaped to represent the figures of the
Apostles. Rich people gave twelve of the "apostles' spoons;" people of
more moderate means gave three or four, or only one with the figure of
the saint after whom the child was named. On Lord Mayor's Day in London,
which came in November and is still celebrated, though shorn of much of
its ancient splendour, the Lord Mayor's fool, as part of the
festivities, jumped into a great bowl of custard, and this is what Ben
Jonson had in mind when he wrote:
"He may, perchance, in tail of a sheriff's dinner,
Skip with a rime o' the table, from near nothing,
And take his almain leap into a custard,
Shall make my lady Maydress and her sisters,
Laugh all their hoods over their shoulders."
It was once widely believed that a stone of magical, medicinal qualities
was set in the toad's head, and so Shakespeare wrote:
"Sweet are the uses of adversity;
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in its head."
"A Midsummer Night's Dream" is the most wonderful fairy story in the
world, but Shakespeare did not create it out of hand; he found the fairy
part of it in the traditions of the country people. One of his most
intelligent students says: "He founded his elfin world on the prettiest
of the people's traditions, and has clothed it in the ever-living flower
of his own exuberant fancy."
This immense mass of belief, superstition, fancy, is called folk-lore
and is to be found in all parts of the world. These fancies or faiths or
superstitions were often distorted with stories, and side by side with
folk-lore grew up the folk-tales, of which there are so many that a man
might spend his whole life writing them down. They were not made as
modern stories are often made, by men who think out carefully what they
are to say, arrange the different parts so that they go together like
the parts of a house or of a machine, and write them with careful
selection of words so as to make the story vivid and interesting.
The folk-tales were not written out; many of them grew out of single
incidents or little inventions of fancy, and became longer and larger as
they passed from one story-teller to another and were retold generation
after generation.
Men love stories, and for very good reasons, as has been pointed out in
introductions to other volumes in this series; and the more quick and
original the imagination of a race, the more interesting and varied will
be its stories. From the earliest times, long before books were made,
the people of many countries were eagerly listening to the men and women
who could tell thrilling or humorous tales, as in these later days they
read the novels of the writers who know how to tell a story so as to
stir the imagination or hold the attention and make readers forget
themselves and their worries and troubles. In India and Japan, in Russia
and Roumania, among the Indians at the foot of the Rocky Mountains,
these stories are still told, not only to children by their mothers and
grandmothers, but to crowds of grown-up people by those who have the art
of making tales entertaining; and there are still so many of these
stories floating about the world from one person to another that if they
were written down they would fill a great library. "Until the generation
now lately passed away," says Mr. Gosse in his introduction to that very
interesting book, "Folk and Fairy Tales" by Asbjörnsen, "almost the only
mode in which the Norwegian peasant killed time in the leisure moments
between his daily labour and his religious observances, was in listening
to stories. It was the business of old men and women who had reached the
extreme limit of their working hours, to retain and repeat these ancient
legends in prose and verse, and to recite or sing them when called to do
so." And Miss Hapgood has told us that in Russia these stories have not
only been handed down wholly by word or mouth for a thousand years, but
are flourishing to-day and extending into fresh fields.
The stories made by the people, and told before evening fires, or in
public places and at the gates of inns in the Orient, belong to the ages
when books were few and knowledge limited, or to people whose fancy was
not hampered by familiarity with or care for facts; they are the
creations, as they were the amusement, of men and women who were
children in knowledge, but were thinking deeply and often wisely of what
life meant to them, and were eager to know and hear more about
themselves, their fellows, and the world. In the earlier folk-stories
one finds a childlike simplicity and readiness to believe in the
marvellous; and these qualities are found also in the French peasant's
version of the career of Napoleon.