e debased
Hottentots, the philosophical Hindoos and the Red Indians of the Far
West, they present, on a close examination, features absolutely
identical. The outlines of a story-plot among savage races are wilder
and more unconfined; they are often a vast unhidebound corpse, but one
that bears no distant resemblance to forms we think more reasonable only
because we find it difficult to let ourselves down to the level of
savage ignorance, and to lay aside the data of thought which have been
won for us by the painful efforts of civilization. The incidents, making
all due allowance for these differences and those of climate and
physical surroundings, are not merely alike; they are often
indistinguishable. It cannot, of course, be expected that the characters
of the actors in these stories will be drawn with skill, or indeed that
any attention will be paid to them. Character-study is a late
development. True: we ought not to overlook the fact that we have to do
with barbarous ideals. In a rudimentary state of civilization the
passions, like the arts, are distinguished not by subtlety and
complexity, but by simplicity and violence of contrast. This may account
to some extent for what seems to us repulsive, inconsistent or
impossible. But we must above all things beware of crediting the
story-teller with that degree of conscious art which is only possible in
an advanced culture and under literary influences. Indeed, the
researches which are constantly extending the history of human
civilization into a remoter and remoter past, go everywhere to show that
story-telling is an inevitable and wholly unconscious growth, probably
arising, as we shall see in the next chapter, out of narratives believed
to record actual events.

I need not stop now to illustrate this position, which is no new one,
and the main lines of which I hope will be rendered apparent in the
course of this volume. But it is necessary, perhaps, to point out that,
although these are the premises from which I start, the limitations
imposed by a work of the size and pretensions of this one will not allow
me to traverse more than a very small corner of the field here opened to
view. It is, therefore, not my intention to attempt any formal proof of
the foregoing generalizations. Rather I hope that if any reader deem it
proper to require the complete evidence on which they rest, he will be
led to further investigations on his own behalf. His feet, I can promise
him, w