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THE SCIENCE OF FAIRY TALES.

CHAPTER I.

THE ART OF STORY-TELLING.

The art of story-telling--Unity of human imagination--Definition
of Fairy Tales--Variable value of Tradition--Story-telling and
the story-teller among various peoples--The connection of
folk-tales with folk-songs--Continuity of Tradition--Need of
accuracy and good faith in reporting stories.

The art of story-telling has been cultivated in all ages and among all
nations of which we have any record; it is the outcome of an instinct
implanted universally in the human mind. By means of a story the savage
philosopher accounts for his own existence and that of all the phenomena
which surround him. With a story the mothers of the wildest tribes awe
their little ones into silence, or rouse them into delight. And the
weary hunters beguile the long silence of a desert night with the mirth
and wonders of a tale. The imagination is not less fruitful in the
higher races; and, passing through forms sometimes more, sometimes less,
serious, the art of story-telling unites with the kindred arts of dance
and song to form the epic or the drama, or develops under the complex
influences of modern life into the prose romance and the novel. These in
their various ways are its ultimate expression; and the loftiest genius
has found no fitter vehicle to convey its lessons of truth and beauty.

But even in the most refined products of the imagination the same
substances are found which compose the rudest. Something has, of course,
been dropped in the process; and where we can examine the process stage
by stage, we can discern the point whereat each successive portion has
been purged away. But much has also been gained. To change the figure,
it is like the continuous development of living things, amorphous at
first, by and by shooting out into monstrous growths, unwieldy and
half-organized, anon settling into compact and beautiful shapes of
subtlest power and most divine suggestion. But the last state contains
nothing more than was either obvious or latent in the first. Man's
imagination, like every other known power, works by fixed laws, the
existence and operation of which it is possible to trace; and it works
upon the same material,--the external universe, the mental and moral
constitution of man and his social relations. Hence, diverse as may seem
at first sight the results among the cultured Europeans and th